We’re making big changes here at WAi. For a long time WAi has been a great little ‘mom and pop’ electronics manufacturing shop. And that culture is still at the core of everything we do. But we’d like to be the most efficient mom and pop electronics manufacturing shop that anybody has ever seen. That takes some work and we’re excited to get started. First things first though. We need to get organized. For a long time our feeders for our pick and place machine were stacked, one on top of the other. This worked well but made it difficult to find the right parts. So we decided to do something about it. Buy some great carts for Bliss Industries. Even though their carts are a great value (some people consider their products expensive, but when you consider just how well made they are, they’re a bargain) but our feeders are so inexpensive, we couldn’t justify spending the same amount of money storing them as it cost us to buy them. So instead we found a great solution in just machining some MDF. Here is a before pictures of how are feeders were stored.

This worked well enough. But as you can see, there’s no way for us to identify what size each feeder is and whether or not any of them might be broken. We got by, but we knew we could do better. So after putting in our newly machined MDF shelves, here’s what our feeder storage looks like.

Our new setup is so much better. This picture was taken just a few moments before we labeled each shelf and made it clear what size feeders belonged where, as well as labeling a specific shelf for suspect feeders that might not be functioning properly. The center area of our shelves leaves plenty of room for our reel holders to fit in between.

Looking forward to more projects like this, and you can be sure we’ll be posting our before and after pictures for our transition.