Swetman Makerspace Tool Cart Organization System, ENGR 205, Spring 2025

The Desperados Engineering Team developed a Tool Cart Organization system. The design was made in Spring Semester 2025 at Cal Poly Humboldt Makerspace. The makerspace was losing time and tools to a lack of organization before this project.

Engr 205 a class based on assigning real life projects met Cal Poly Humboldt's Makerspaces needs for someone to upgrade their space. Multiple big stations needed to be improved, or documented to improve the efficiency of the Makerspace. Team Desperados designed and implemented a tool cart organization system. The system needed to make the staff and students interactions with tool carts shorter and easier. The tool carts needed to become tools themselves, not something you had to think about.

The Objective of this project is to design, test, and manufacture a tool cart organization system that is the same in every tool cart. The system should make using the tool carts intuitive, and cut down on time of people finding tools, and putting them away. It can involve multiple methods for overall organization.

Include a brief intro to the criteria and then include a table with constraints and weights (0-10 highest).

Criteria	Description	Weight (1-10)
Safety	Nobody should hurt or get hurt using this system	10
Using surrounding carts to make one complete tool cart	We must identify what a complete tool cart looks like	9
All of tools are marked for individual carts.	Each tool is connected to a specific cart	9
Tool Separation	The tools aren’t overlapping and have their own spots	9
Book-keeping	Staff can easily tell when something is missing	9
Expandability	There’s room and means to add tools in the future	8
Aesthetics	The system looks good	7
Replaceability	When something breaks it can be replaced easily	7
Cost	Under $500 in material cost	7
Portability	Ability to move system around after finishing placements	6
Organizing Multiple types of tools	How individual tools should be grouped together	5
Durability	How much damage the tools can take from general wear and tear	4

The team came up with 3 rounds of prototyping for the tool cart organization system. Each prototype was an attempt at a different component of our final result.

This prototype focused on how well the 3D printed grids would fit into the tool carts. The grids were meant to fit in cleanly but there are limits to their size. We learned that once tools on set in the grids won’t slide around.

The second set of prototypes are using the laser engraver to cut out colored words to label the tool cart. We put electrical tape, acrylic marker, and labels to indicate which cart to tools went to. The electrical tape doesn’t always stay on so we had to tape the ends. We considered spray paint but it was out of our budget.

With this prototype we are testing out the open source Gridfinity designs for wrench holders. This design failed because the gaps for the wrenches individually were not wide enough and snapped. We will have to design our own holsters for the power tools because of their odd shape.

The final product is a multi method tool organization system with most drawers having a black square grid on the bottom. Each tool has a custom 3D printed holster that fits neatly into the grid. That slotted connection keeps the tools and grid from sliding around. Each tool is labeled with either a colored piece of electrical tape, acrylic marker, or labels of corresponding color to a tool cart. Each tool cart has a labeled word of a color and is the color it spells to complete the color coordinating organization. Each drawer has a label on the outside roughly identifying what tools will be inside.

The final product is meant to ease the finding and putting away of tools. The color matching between carts and tools is intuitive when putting things away. Gridfinity's format allows staff to quickly look into drawers and know what is missing.

This system was constructed over a few months with the bulk of it being 3D printing and labeling tools

Hammer System:

1. Find a sheets of foam that are the same dimensions as the drawer's base
2. Find the dimensions of both hammers
3. Sketch where hammers should be laid out on the foam
4. Cut out holes for hammers to lay

   

   

5. Place the sheet of foam with the cutouts in the drawer
6. Lay hammers in their cut out location

Grid Printing:

Each grid had to be printed one at a time and each print took 45 minutes,

Tool Holster Printing:

Same as the grid printing we sourced some of our holsters from the open source platform as well as created new holsters for tools that weren’t currently available.

Laser Printing Tool Cart Labels

Laser printed Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple for labeling external tool Carts.

Below is a list of materials and their prices leading to our total cost of the project.

Item	Amount	Cost per unit	Total
3D Printing Filament	16	USD 9.75	USD 156.00
Acrylic Markers	6	USD 4.72	USD 28.32
Electrical Tape — Although we used 6 colors, 2 were provided by the Swetman Makerspace.	4	USD 1.57	USD 6.28
Acrylic Boards — Provided by the Swetman Makerspace free of charge.	6	USD 0.00	USD 0.00
Grand total			USD 190.6EUR 163.92 <br />GBP 139.14 <br />CAD 236.34 <br />MXN 3,974.01 <br />INR 14,266.41 <br />

1. 3D print and place the Gridfinity base plates into the tool cart drawers.
2. Inserts all of the Gridfinity tool holsters into the tool cart drawers.
3. Sort tools by frequency of use, place the more commonly used tools up front and less commonly used tools further back.
4. To get the tool you want, simply just pick it up from the tool holster
5. To return a tool, simply place it back into the holster
6. To add more tools or create more space, simply move the tool holsters to fit your workplace needs.

Maintenance of the organization system is minimal and simple. The tool holsters can go anywhere on the grid base as long as the tools fit in that one drawer. There is enough room in each drawer to put tools back in. The only maintenance necessary will be if a 3D printed holster breaks

Daily Maintenance:

• Have students report broken PLA
• Reprint Broken Pieces

Weekly

• Scan Carts for broken grid or tool holsters
• Reprint Broken Components

Monthly

• Check security of tool labeling
• Reprint labels or retape

Yearly

• Check security of all labels including, tools and carts

Our project went well the only downfall was the amount of printing this project takes with filling up 6 tool carts.

Results went swimmingly with success in all parts.

- Identify Problems, the scope, and deal with it by conducting research and gathering information

- Brainstorm solutions, don't just jump on the first one or the best looking one

- Be thorough on your research, it is the foundation of your entire project

We hope to expand this Gridfinity solution to the new tools in the tool carts to keep them organized and space efficient!

Problem	Solution
Tool Holster Breaks	3D print new holster with designs given
Labels Wear Out	Either tape or use acrylic marker to fill in wear and tear
Difficulty finding tools	Rearrange the drawer to have commonly used tools more accessible and less used tools less accessible
Parts or tools gone missing	Look at the inserts to see what tool is missing in tool cart
Dust or debris in drawer	Take out all holsters and grids and tools and clean, then replace everything back to normal
If anything breaks	Print out new one using 3D printer

Students of the Cal Poly Humboldt Engineering Program Spring 2025.

• Shota Lam
• Dennis Wheeler
• Daniel Melendez
• Hudson Mckinny