Reduce Clutter with a Cheap Styrene Sheet Organizer

If you do any amount of scratch building for your model railroad, you undoubtedly use sheets of styrene or sheets of wood. And when it comes time to do a project, undoubtedly you're sorting through the drawer, you're sorting through the box that you have all these packages stored in, and you're looking for exactly the right size of styrene, or wood. And the worst case scenario is you've sorted all through that drawer, all through that box and you found out that you're out of the size that you need, and that's the end of that project for that day. Well, here's an easy relatively inexpensive way to keep that from happening and it's called an expandable file folder. Expandable file folders are available at office supply stores like Office Max or Office Depot or Staples. And what it is, is a folder that has multiple pockets in it. As you can see here, it's got all sorts of places to put your sheet styrene or sheet wood. It's as simple as finding and marking each of these tabs, I've used a label maker here for the size of styrene in my case that I'm using. So when it comes time and you need a sheet of 20,000 styrene, it's easy enough to just go to that tab and pull out the package of styrene. You can add packages as you need to, you can leave them in the package, you can take them out of the package and put them in there all by themselves. Now, what happens if you've got little pieces of the styrene left over? Well, I have put those little pieces in a sandwich bag clearly marked the sandwich bag and also stick it in my expandable file folder and that makes it very easy to find little small pieces that you can use as wedges or as little details on the layout. In my case here I bought an expandable file folder that has a lot of different pockets in it so I'm able to keep my little scraps of styrene in one pocket and keep the full sheets or the nearly full sheets in another pocket behind it. In addition to having five, 10, 20,30, 40, 60, and 80,000 styrene pockets marked here, I've got enough pockets in this one that allow me to have pockets for Clapboard siding, for Car Siding, for V-groove siding, Metal siding, that sort of stuff, Clear Acetate and even a Frosted Acetate. I've got enough pockets in this one so that I can have pieces of rod and pieces of larger styrene in a sandwich bag tucked into this. You can spend as little as 10 or $12 to get a cardboard model that will work just fine for your styrene. In my case I decided to splurge a little bit, get these multiple pockets and get one that has a lid and a latch on it. So this way I can close this up and put this up on the shelf in my work room or underneath the workbench when it's time to get the styrene that I need, the handle makes it nice and convenient to get it to where I'm going just open it up and find exactly what I need in there. You don't wanna stop your scratch building projects in midstream because you're out of material. You don't wanna bother of rifling through a drawer or a box looking for something when you're kind of on a roll scratch building. An expandable file folder that you can get at any office supply store is a great way of doing that.