Wrenchin’ Wednesday: Wrench organization for the road
Between taking my own personal projects on the road and shoving a dozen different race cars across finish lines, paring down the big toolbox at my shop into a simple kit is a never-ending task. It’s worth the time, though. Organizing your tools on the road means that things get lost less frequently, and you can quickly find what you need. Picking and choosing the relevant tools for each car or trip makes storage easier and the end result will prove far more useful than a “tool kit” comprised of sockets, wrenches, and anything else that ends up in the back seat.
Wrenches are vital to almost any repair, but keeping them sorted in a regular tool bag is futile. While tool rolls are ideal in many cases, the roll itself makes a small pack of tools many times larger—which is where this week’s Wrenchin’ Wednesday steps in.
Carabiners and hitch-pins are perfect for corralling box-end wrenches in a space-efficient, organized way. I’ll even group together different types of wrenches, like ratchet wrenches, onto their own carabiner to further sort a tool kit. Most likely, you won’t need every wrench that comes in a set, either, so if you can pare down the set to the necessary sizes, you can save even more space.
I personally dig hitch pins; the rectangle shape just works better for keeping wrenches aligned and it still allows you to hang the arrangement somewhere handy. The wrenches are easier to unlock from a hitch pin than from a carabiner, too, but the latter fulfills the same duty of keeping your wrenches neatly organized.
Little solutions like this make life easier when times get tough. What off-beat ways do you use to stash your tools?
