The most organised allen key drawer?

Over the years, Jonathan has amassed an impressive collection of allen key sets. Bondhus t-handle sets in both metric and imperial. Wera tools sets and also Wiha sets in both metric and imperial too. But what’s the best way to keep them organised and make it easy to find what you need? Shadow Foam of course! So this project sees us back in our workshop organising another tool drawer in our Clarke tool chest. Bondus Wiha Wera tools

The project

You will no doubt have seen some of our other videos where we are replacing the 7-8 year old, now discontinued Shadow Foam original inserts in our Clarke roll-cab drawers. Swapping everything out using our newer, more robust and longer-lasting grade of Shadow Foam. Today it’s the turn of our allen key drawer. With much finer tools that have a very slim profile, people sometime find this daunting. But it doesn’t have to be! Here we demonstrate just how quick and easy it can be to get them organised. Bondus Wiha Wera tools

The collection of allen keys Jonathan has is vast. And despite being over 3 different tool brands, is still colour co-ordinated. Colour coding is such an important factor in tool control. I you don’t already have it in place with your tools, Shadow Foam combined with our other visual management tools means it’s really cheap and easy to achieve. Here, we have the long-reach Bondhus metric t-handles which are red in colour. Then their AF or imperial ones are yellow. And the Wiha allen key sets also adopt the same colour coding with the metric in red and imperial in yellow. They also have a set of torques in green. In this drawer too, we also a set of Wera alan keys to fit in there too.

We went for orange shadow Foam colour for this. While the 30mm depth probably would have been deep enough to store these items, as the rest of the drawers have been done in 50mm, we used the deeper foam here too. That just helps keep the whole project nice and uniform. Bondus Wiha Wera tools

Detailing

Annoyingly (when your attention to detail is as tuned-in as Jona’s) the Bondhus t-handle set comes as a set of 10. However, the imperial only comes as a set of 8. So to make the layout more pleasing to the eye he actually added in an additional red-handled one to balance up the layout. You obviously don’t need to do that though!

Another thing that makes cutting very uniform items like this into foam inserts is making sure they are all square. Be aware, some cheaper sets with moulded handles aren’t perfectly square. So once laid out and cut into the foam this can make tiny imperfections really obvious. So with this Jonathan took plenty of time to ensure he was cutting them in squarely and uniformly. The trick to this is by squaring the shaft of the handles rather than the handles themselves.

Once that’s done you can add details like finger pulls. Whilst these do look really good, they also serve the purpose of allowing you to take items out more easily. We use our meter rule along with a ruler and our stencil set for doing this. Then once all done, we take our foam smoothing spinners to the cut area to make it look really polished and smooth.

Finally for that impactful finishing touch we added our Shadow Foam logo. You can easily do this yourself with your own logo or name. You can see more how this is done in our logo cutting video here. Bondus Wiha Wera tools

The end result

We were really pleased with this one! It was a really great upgrade from the original foam insert we had in this drawer originally. And the added detail of the finger pulls and logo really made it pop. Bondus Wiha Wera tools

Using our foam smoothing spinners gave us a super clean finish in the base of the cuts. Better still, now it will be really obvious if someone doesn’t replace any items in the drawer!