The Corolla AE92 GT-S Project

A website about my ongoing project

Nederlandse vlag Engelse vlag

Storage of all the parts

With a project such as this, with a complete strip down of the car, you really find out how many parts are used to create these cars.

 

When you strip a car of all of its parts, those parts need to go somewhere.

But just throwing them on one big pile and calling it a day isn't really going to work, if you want to restore the parts and reassemble the car someday again too.

And it's not just the bigger parts too. What to do with all the fastners that come of the car? The car uses a multitude of different bolts, nuts and other fastners to keep it all together. Throwing them all in one big box and hope you'll find the right one when you all put it back together is really going to screw with you in the end.

 

So organizing it all a bit seems a good idea. But you need to do it right from the start, or you might not know what went where and what bolts were used to mount it in place. Certainly not after a few weeks, months, years of maybe even decades when you're handling the parts again.

And searching for hours for that one part or the bolt that goes with it starts to get old really fast.

 

That's why I tried to be as organized as possible from the start. This was the first time I disassembled a complete car. Youtube instruction video's on how to rebuild your car weren't even a thought back then, and people didn't really document or blog all that much on the internet too either.

So I had to find out how I was going to do it all myself. 

 

I got myself a whole bunch of small plastic containers to store all the nuts, bolt and other small parts that came from the car. Whenever I took something off the car, I put the bolts for that part in one of these containers and write on it what is was from.

 

Larger parts were stored in boxes in the same way. If I took off a door for instance, all the fastners from the window regulator for example were put in one plastic container, marked with what the bolt were from.

The window regulator itself was put in a box with all the other larger parts from that door, and marked what those parts came from.

 

bouten bakjes

 

opslagrekken

Parts storage in the first workshop where I started to dismantle the car.

 

But as I was quickly running out of space in that first workshop, the much larger parts did end up getting thrown on a big pile.

 

Hoop met onderdelen

The bigger parts start forming a big pile very quickly when taken off the car and no decent place to store them.

 

When we moved to our second workshop, we had a bit more room and the luxury of a small attic. This meant that the parts storage could move up. Whe made a crane we could use to lift up all the parts and was strong enough to handle even wheighty parts like engines and gearboxes.

This meant I had more room below to work on the car itself:

 

2e werkplaats

 

opslag

Parts storage in the attic of the second workshop. Starting to look better.

 

But although the boxes had written on them what was in them, searching for parts that were hidden somewhere in the big pile of larger parts was still very time consuming. The parts themselves did start to suffer from this kind of storage. Foam of seats started to get permanently disformed for instance.

 

But after a few years we had to move to another workshop again. And we didn't have an attic there anymore, so we had to find a practical way of storing all the parts and other stuff we started to store over the years.

And the best way to do that is still to go up!

 

So we bought ourselves some proffesional, used warehouse pallet racks and a whole bunch of europallets. But to be able to handle these pallets we also bought a used and cheap forklift.

To keep it all safe, we went about things right and bolted the racks to the floor and secured them from the upper structure of the building so they couldn't fall over. 

 

Werkplaats 3

Starting to set up the new workshop. The first rack is used by my parents and brother as well.

 

2e palletstelling werkplaats

But one rack wasn't enough. I needed an additional rack for just the parts of the car.

 

All the pallets and parts are neatly stored now and don't take up much room in the workshop. But you can't exactly look what's in the pallets when the are 5 meters up in the air. And moving a whole bunch of pallets in and out of the racks to find that one part you are looking for gets real old real soon as well.

 

You might remember what parts are stored where in the beginning, but after a few weeks, months or maybe even years that really starts to fade away.

So again, organization is key to be able to keep track of where everything is stored.

 

In total, I'm using 16 pallets to store all my parts. So I put numbers on all those pallets and made a list what parts were stored in which pallet, together with the status of the part. I processed all this in an Excel sheet which I printed out and hang on the racks so I could easily find the part I was looking for and pull out the right pallet the first time.

 

palletstelling genummerde pallets   palletstelling 2 genummerde pallets

Numbered labels on all the pallets to keep track of which parts are stored where.

 

Onderdelenlijst werkplaats

A list with the loctaion of every single part of the entire car. 6 of these sheets in total

 

And sometimes you have to get a little creative to store vunerable or larger parts you can't really store on a europallet. You want to store them in a safe way and so that they won't get damaged by things falling on them or something like that. But you still want to be able to easily reach them.

 

So for all the glass from the car I made a custom, closed crate so that it is protected until I need it.

Other large parts like the doors, bonnet, bootlid and bumpers are also difficult to store because they take up a lot of room and are sometimes oddly shaped.

So again I made some custom pallets so they could easily and effeciently be stored but would still be able to pull them out of the racks easily.

 

speciaal pallet plaatwerk   speciaal pallet plaatwerk

 

speciaal pallet bumpers   speciaal pallet bumpers

 

speciale pallets in stelling