Friday, September 12, 2014

Compartments, Chaos-Pack, Flambeau-Pack

Flambeau. That word incites to organize, and celebrate organization. Recently, I purchased two large, 24 compartment Flambeau boxes, to put my capacitor collection into spreadsheet-like compartments. The reason I suddenly have a lot of capacitors, is because I started a new project, called Tocante, based on the industrial values, called preferred numbers, used to grade components, and the musical tuning they generate when used in oscillators. There is a musicology here, and I defer to a separate post to use spreadsheets and graphs to show the uniqueness of this tuning. This post is about organizers!

Organization by Talenti: too deep for electronic components, much better for gelato.

I found these deep Flambeaus in the dumpster of the materials institute, Johns Hopkins University. They were labeled "Piyush" and contained metals embedded in epoxy. I have since used them for the bulk of my components storage. Chaos-pack works here, because the components are quickly used and in bulk, so there's almost no point to sorting them out.

Another deep and long Flambeau with Chaos-Pack

Now this milky Flambeau, since it has 24 compartments, suits a high degree of organization, for components graded in preferred numbers. Serendipitously, electronic components are graded in multiples of three, according to the E3, E6, or E12 scale, so you can see "103" and "102" are in the same column. This box makes it easy to see magic numbers and the composition of scales more clearly, plus it has room for some spare inductors and diodes. Bigger capacitors in the back, and smaller in the front: a musical scale that goes from low to high. The reason it starts on 223 and ends on 471 is because the primary scale is from 103 to 102 and the extensions provide alternative pitch clusters by doubling or halving their value; capacitors in parallel doubles, series halves.

This is an organizer I inherited from my dad; it held locks, nuts, bolts, washers, gaskets, and cotter pins. Now it holds the 10 colors of "Johnson Banana Plug" as well as a few other chaos-packed drawers of components.

Storage by cardboard box: for counterpoint here is part of the wood storehouse.

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