A tidy bench is the sign of a diseased mind

I admit i'm not the tidiest person in the world. Im not even the tidiest person in the house today (and theres only me and Sam here!), but I blame this on my bit of youthful gunsmithing - so long as you knew where your smokelamp was, everything was fine.

This is my work bench. Yes its incredibly untidy, but I usually have several projects on the go at any time, and they are often very long in the doing! On here at the moment is Wispy, in the foreground being worked on, my 'Manhattan' pads in the butter tub to the left. Theres an 80m Pixie in an Altoids tin, and the 'TennaLady' mock-up over by the multimeter. The tidiest part of the bench isn't shown, and thats the test bench to the far left

 

On the right hand side of the bench, its often a bit tidier, but today its stacked up with tubs full of salvaged components awaiting sorting, something im doing a bit of today.

When sorted, usable parts go into a growing collection of buttertubs! Each holds a particular kind of part, broken where necessary into ranges, for instance theres a tub for 'Opto' which contains LEDs, small bulbs, LED and LCD displays etc, and associated mounting hardware. Theres two for non-electrolytic capacitors, with a range break at 1nF.

Its not perfect, as I still need a lot more tubs to fully sort everything into suitable homes, and as I do, the lack of shelf space will also start causing problems!