jeffmoss26 wrote:I don't have room for pegboard in my basement, so I use divided plastic bins and Plano boxes.
Was at the local Menards (a mostly mid-western home center type store) recently and found one of these tool boxes (by Plano, made in USA) on sale for $14. They are also sold as tackle boxes (saw the very same thing in a Gander Mountain store last weekend), but they seem to cost more (twice as much) when sold for that purpose.
Each box has a compartment on the top then has four slide-out trays and each tray has 9 compartments (adjustable).
I got one to store key blanks in, now that I'm starting to mess around with impressioning after Gordon's how-to post got me over the hump. One of these tool boxes can store 36 different large blanks, or twice that number of small (padlock) blanks. Each compartment can hold at least ten full-size keys, so each tool box could hold 360 full size keys or over 600 padlock keys.
Numbered each compartment then I have an index sorted by blank name. Like it so well I got a second one, so one box is for home and commercial keys and the other is for furniture and pad locks. Sure, it is more expensive than a sheet of peg board, but right now I don't have room for a peg board, and this set up would allow me to make house calls.
I have a pdf of Ilco's key blank catalog, and even have an old paper copy of it, but I found this handy 7 page chart on-line the other day.
http://www.mcmaster.com/#10655aac/=11jjose I don't think the company with the link is the most cost-effective source of blanks, but it is a handy chart with most of the common blanks (for the US anyway). If I need to buy something anyway from McMaster-Carr, it would be less expensive to buy a few blanks from them than to pay shipping for a few blanks from someone else, but otherwise their prices are high. I printed it out the chart, wrote down the tray and compartment number for the blanks I have so far, then folded up the few sheets and put it in the top compartment.
As I've ordered key blanks I've tried to pick up a few other common ones and this way I'm slowly building up a collection of the more common ones so that when the opportunity or need to impression, or duplicate something, arises I'll likely have the right blank on hand.
The top compartment of one of them holds files (warped up in cardboard to protect them), sand paper, fine Sharpie markers, and a hand-vise. The other one holds the extra cutters to my key machine (wrapped in paper) and my set of space and depth keys.
