I have a bin. Clear plastic, no label, lives on a shelf in the workshop. It’s full of screws.
Not a set of screws. Not an organized assortment with little labeled drawers. A bin. Machine screws, wood screws, hex nuts, nylon washers, lock washers, standoffs, springs, a couple of red and black binding posts, one rubber foot from something I no longer own, and a half-crushed box of wire nails from the hardware store in the town where I grew up.
Every piece in there came off something. That’s the rule of the bin. Nothing goes in new. It goes in when a project ends, when a gadget dies, when I take something apart to see how it works and it doesn’t go back together the same way (which is most of the time, right).
How It Started
I didn’t decide to start a screw bin. It happened. It started small. You’re cleaning up after a project and there are four leftover screws on the bench and you can’t throw them out because they’re perfectly good screws. So you put them in a cup. Then the cup gets full and you move them to a bag. Then the bag rips, and you buy a bin.
That was decades ago. I know it was decades because that box of wire nails is 25 years old. I bought it at the hardware store where I grew up, and it has been riding along ever since.
The binding posts are from a bench power supply project. The nylon standoffs are from a stack of circuit boards I built during the ioBridge days. Some of the tiny machine screws came out of hard drives that stopped spinning a long time ago. Every layer is a different era. It’s a core sample of my hobbies.
It Has Survived Many Moves
Here’s the part that gets me. That bin has survived several moves. Different houses, different states, a couple of trucks. Every time we packed, there was a moment where someone (usually me) held the bin up and asked the question: do we really need to move a box of random screws across state lines?
And every time, the bin got in the truck.
Not because I had a plan for it. Because throwing it out felt like throwing out a tool. A weird tool that only works one time in fifty.
Now my bag of parallel port cables for my printer and ZIP drives didn’t survive.
The Save
Working on a pinball machine, I needed the perfect screw and bracket. I spent a half hour digging through the bin, partially remembering I had something like what I was thinking. Then, I found it. It was exhilarating.
This has happened more than once. A washer. A bolt for a part I didn’t even know I needed until I needed it. A standoff with the exact thread for a board I was mounting. A nut that fit the one bolt I had left. Every save felt like winning a tiny lottery I had been buying tickets for over decades.
I also never took the time to properly acknowledge the random screw bin. This is my love letter and my attempt to correct the record.
Start Yours
If you build things, start a bin. Today. Any container. Put the leftover screws in it instead of the trash. Don’t sort it, don’t label it, and don’t judge it. A coffee can? Start small… An Altoids box. Just have fun with it.
In ten years, at 9 PM, one screw short, you’ll be glad it exists. And, you can tell your partner, see, I was right to keep this bin!
And when you move, it goes in the truck. And your kids’ kids will be puzzled when they find it. What was grandpa doing with one giant locking washer? Then, they will start one with the gregs of yours, and thank you when they blog using a brain implant. I am certain blogging will survive Web 4.0.