it's 2017 for God's sake. I'm so over
manila file folders. There has GOT to be a better way of storing get cuts that is easy to peruse but won't turn into a giant mess!!! Someone out there has surely come up with a clever way to do this better, and I want to know how!
Also taking ideas for full-sheet storage as well, although a
flat file cabinet is probably still the best for that...
@tdtastic Two comments, one for full sheets and the second for cuts.
For full sheets. First off, I was in what you'd
call "a regional" at the time and decided to
stock Roscolux in depth and little else. My plan was to keep two full sheets of every color of
Roscolux plus
Lee 201 and 202 due to demand. By keeping cuts organized, having two full sheets in
stock was generally enough. To store the sheets, it took less floor space to store them rolled in approximately 4" internal diameter tubes and still kept them all instantly accessible and easy to quickly scan for restocking. I made friends with a local carpeting store and was able to get their used cardboard cores when they were finished with them. They saved their empty cores to
roll up carpet cuts for installations but eventually cores, normally 12' long, would get broken and then they'd come my way where I was cutting them into lengths only slightly longer than the width of a sheet of
Roscolux. Using 1" x 3" pine assembled with pneumatic nails and glue, I built open racks to support the cardboard tubes. I stored the tubes 10 wide by 12 high occupying a good hunk of wall in our
dimmer room but comparatively little floor. I labelled the inside of one end of every tube with Brady high contrast black on yellow adhesive backed labels. This gave me 110 tubes for
Roscolux and 10 across the bottom shelf for a few
Lee colors and the odd
GAM color that some "designer" just couldn't live without. I'm sure you've never met the type: Designers where the entire success of their design hinged upon having a color only available from
GAM or Furse, or
Rosco's
Roscolar range.
When it came to storing cuts, I waited until local election time and then made it known I wanted every election poster I could collect if they were in re-usable condition. I lucked out. One candidate had ordered two skids of lawn-sized blanks cut from 1/8" thick
Masonite pre-finished with matte white on one side AND THEN opted to pull out of the election BEFORE having his blank signs painted and used. A couple of hours at the table saw and radial arm saw got me more rigid separators than I needed. Next came a three drawer high by one drawer wide deep file cabinet bolted to a 1-1/2" plywood
base with very good Darnell casters and I had three drawers of convenient
gel files which occupied little floor space, fit in either of the handi-capped elevators and took up little
wing space on production weeks between productions. The white pre-painted 1/8"
Masonite was heavy and occupied file space but it was rigid and didn't collapse and
roll under like the old, non-hanging, Manilla folders did. White side forward + black Sharpies equaled instant labelling. Unlabelled dividers at the rear, label up a fresh divider every time a designer called up a color we hadn't used before. Top two drawers were
Roscolux with oddities in the bottom drawer. Worked well for me while I was there.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.