Chaos In The Garage

After I found a way to tidy up my power tools, it was time to face the true chaos in the garage, my wads of multicolored, automotive wires.

My old, but sophisticated storage system - a large, flat, plastic bin with the wires shoved into it, willy-nilly*.

Looking around the Internet for ways to store wires, I came across the idea of wrapping them on spools and then storing the spools on rods, like they do at Home Depot. Brilliant! I went on Amazon and ordered two different types of spools. One was large and obviously too bulky for the 50 or so different color combinations of wire that I had. The other I felt was perfect, a narrow spool made for thread.

They both failed.

While I'm sure these spools work great for thread, insulated wiring is substantially bulkier. After about 8 winds, the wire was over the top of the spool walls and spilling all over the place.

The larger spools would have sufficed, but they occupied too much volume to provide a universal solution.

I ended up doing what I should have done from the start, if I hadn't been in such a hurry. I coiled the wires and secured them with tape.

Sometimes the simplest ways are the best ways.

Here's the math of the problem. Spools and coils are cylinders. Their volume is 

Pi * r^2 * h

Where r is the radius of the spool / coil and h is the height.

The spools had uniform volume, regardless of how full they were of wire. With a 1" radius and a height of 2.5", each spool had a volume of about 8 cubic inches.

A coiled spool of wire, taking a representative sample, has a radius of 2 and a height of 0.25. That gives it a volume of about 7 cubic inches.

The Coupe De Grace

I'm almost done with the MGB rewiring project. I think I've made my final version of the center console and as soon as that's wired and installed, I can put the wires away for the foreseeable future. The simple, coiled wires ought to be easier to store than the spools.

I still want to work on another old car, but I think it will be a ~1969 Chevy El Camino SS and if I have my way, I'll only work on the mechanical aspects of the car. While I learned a lot from the MGB rewiring effort, I've quite had my fill of that sort of thing.

In any case, it's simple, coiled wires for the win!

* - It's unjust of me to blame this mess on Willy Nilly. Willy, I apologize.