Get to the flow state with first order retrievability, he says

Wednesday 19th April, 2023 - Bruce Sterling





The Sortimo T-BOXX ships the week of April 24

Made in Germany by Sortimo – www.mysortimo.us

Savage industries has released its own Sortimo T-Boxx in my favorite color (orange), with my Savage Industries logo printed on the box lid.

Every shop is a philosophy about how to work. My shop philosophy is to engineer the lowest possible threshold to the flow state. Finding things fast means working more intuitively. These highly visible, rugged, configurable sorting boxes are the best in the world.

Included with the purchase of a Savage Industries Sortimo T-BOXX is the digital plan for a rolling storage bin mini-cabinet as seen in my Tested One-Day Build video.

Savage Industries Sortimo T-BOXX Specifications

Dimensions (LxWxH): 13.78 in x 17.323 in x 3.15 in (35 cm x 44 cm x 8 cm)
Weight: 5lb 5oz (2.43 kg)
Color: Too Hot To Handle Orange
Includes the following 16 H63 inset boxes and dividers:
6x inset boxes 1×1
4x inset boxes 1×2
2x inset boxes 2×2
2x inset boxes 1×4
1x inset box 2×3
1x inset box 2×6
4x dividers IB 1×0
4x dividers IB 2×0
Organization, categorization, and taxonomy have always been a key part of my shop practice since the beginning of being a maker. The idea is that I want to achieve the lowest possible moves to get to mission critical equipment. I call this philosophy: “first order retrievability.”

Halfway through my tenure on Mythbusters, my then cameraman Tim Alewood told me about a German company that outfitted repair vans and ambulances in Europe. The company was called Sortimo and the product he wanted me to see was called the T-Boxx.

This product, featuring up to 48 indexible colored sorting inserts, plus rugged clear tops, and the addition of a handle, immediately captured my attention. I had been putting stuff into different sorting systems for 25 years at that point, and I knew perfection when I came across it. I immediately bought four of them, and the reality of how good they are at sorting exceeded even my excited expectations. I had found my infrastructure solution. I bought 30 of them, followed by 20 more over the next couple of years. I then endeavored to fill them. First with every bearing, spring, rivet, switch, bulb, and electronic part I’ve been storing for decades.

I then invested in all the nuts, bolts, wing nuts, flat and button heads, and turned my shop into the hardware store of my dreams. I spent days making tiny labels and extensive lists, and eventually built a cross referenced, alphabetized list that I still use today. It tells me where everything is, and in which sorter. There’s an entry for both “rubber corks” and “corks, rubber.” It needs updating about once a year.

Being able to pull out a discrete container, and to further remove its varying sizes of indexable sub-containers and spill them out, is invaluable in making. A dizzying array of over 100,000 individual objects are immediately available to me. The system allows me to work as fast as I can think.

These are without a doubt the most durable, visible, versatile and useful sorters ever made for a generalist like myself.

About the price…you can buy these boxes for less directly from Sortimo, just not in orange and with my logo. We’ve priced this item as low as possible after factoring in the costs for custom color, tooling, and shipping from Germany. If you want a whole bunch, reach out to our team at info@savageindustriesshop.com and we’ll see what we can do.