I have several small rolls of wire that I keep on my bench that are used for wiring various products up. They were setting in a small wooden box and not easy to get to or use so I made up a simple wooden rack to hold my spools of wire. There are three 3/4" wooden dowels that are glued to the end pieces and three 3/4" dowels that hold the spools. The spool dowels are held in place with magnets. (I originally had another plan to hold them in place and my wife said, “Boy that sounds complicated”. It was too complicated so I switched to the magnets which work a treat. But she wanted me to make her a rack to hold ribbons and threads and such.)
This rack has my company name carved int eh side, I made a second one with the university’s logo on the side. When I took the one to the university today I realized that many of my wire spools there have a smaller hole through them. So that made me wonder what range in hole sizes there might be on small rolls of wire.
So here is my question for you guys: If you have rolls of wire that you use a lot what diameter is the hole in the spool? Also, what length and diameter is the spool? I’ll redesign the wire rack so it will work with as wide a range of spools as possible and post the plans. I made mine with a CNC machine but you could cut it out by hand as well. I just thought it would make a nice simple project to share with others.
Looks great, Jeff! I’ve been planning to do something similar but it’ll have to squeeze into one of the few remaining empty spots on my desk.
I measured my spools and all the wire are 1" but I’d probably also put my solder too which has a 3/4" hole. Not sure if the magnets would be strong enough to hold a couple rolls of solder. I love the idea.
The front side of the rack has 3/4" holes that the dowels slide through which the back side of the rack has 3/4" circular pockets that are 3/8" deep (1/2 of 3/4" stock thickness) that the dowel sets into. The magnets just keep the dowels from sliding sideways out of the pockets.
I considered doing a rack like this, and I also plan(ned) to put some of that 1/4" foam rubber stuff in front of the spools to poke the wire through and hold it in place.
@ Ian, here is a picture of the pocket the spool dowels set in.
@ godefroi, I have tried to think of a way to hold the end of the wires. it would be nice to have them all on one side of the rack so you can just grab the wire you need and pull some out. I was thinking of adding two 1/4" dowels that set one behind the other horizontally. Their vertical position would be half way between the upper and lower spool dowels and their position horizontally would be near the edge with about 1/4" gap between them. The wire would pass under the inner most dowel and over the outer most dowel, that should put enough bend in the wire to hold it in place yet it should still be easy to pull out the wire when you need it.
After using the rack for about a week now I can say there is a need to have some sort holder for the ends of the wires to slide through. Not only would it be nice to have all wires available from one side of the rack but without the end of the wire being held in place the roll has a tendency to spring loose and you wind up with a mess of wire.
My wife suggested a dowel with small holes drill it in, that would work for wires, you could mark on top of the dowel so you know which wire is which, but it would not work for things like SMT parts or other flat items. Guess a bit more experimentation is in order.
With two pieces of this to sandwich the wire, you’d have 3/8" of foam, so depending on how tight you make the fit, you should be able to support a variety of wire thicknesses.
