Your setup looks phenomenal! When I released Gridfinity, I barely expected anyone else to make one, let alone fill a whole workshop with custom blocks. I didn't optimize my designs at all, because I assumed folks would print it piecemeal to finish off almost-empty spools of filament. I'm glad the community has developed more efficient remixes, like Braden Eliason's Gridfinity Vase Mode and UnifyTech's Skeletonized Base.

My main lesson in printing gridfinity is that not everything has to be 100% gridfinity.  With a dado stack or a cove bit and a piece of plywood, you can make drill bit holders that could drop into a thin walled gridfinity box.  You can use Kaizen foam with your plain boxes.

I've run into this issue throughout my life - you get a new tool, and now every problem is going to be solved with that tool.  But you end up wasting time or materials doing it all one way.  Tools and techniques can be used together.  3D printing can't do everything, just as a CNC won't do everything for you, etc.

It's so refreshing to find a channel with a normal speaking voice.  Thank you!!

Just left Open Sauce. One of the booths basically made for this. Gotta look at my footage to remember the name but it is a free tool that allows you to take a photo of any tool(s) on white paper from above, send it to their web app, and auto generate an STL DXF etc file for organizers. Should speed up the design stuff massively but not the print time and filament.

I started by printing a large assortment of bin sizes using lightweight generic bin designs. Then I organized my drawers into these generic bins, being careful not to overfill the bins. It was easy to swap bins around and test layouts because the bins were ubiquitous. After everything was organized, then I made custom bins as needed (and continue to do so). Now I have a box of generic bins that I loan to friends that are considering using gridfinity.

Really helpful to see a realistic viewpoint, instead of the myriad of unrealistic "influencer" style videos on 3D printing that are very light on detail, and make out it's all perfect!

I've decided on the mantra of "if it's not everlasting, it just gets a tray."
Most things don't need perfect holders, they need generic trays. I label the bottom sometimes, but for the most part I only do "custom" holders for things like very nice tool that will likely last my whole life. Other things that are a generally universal standard (jobber length drills, for example) get semi custom holders.

For things like the step-drills, I printed generic holders for any hex bits and these that they all go into standing upright. This means you can rearrange things when you realise your initial idea isn't right after all, and it insulates you from increasing/shrinking your collection or buying different sized replacements.

Tool collections are never static.  I am always adding and subtracting. I like mine organized but not that organized.  It looks pretty now, but next year after some are broken or lost and some new additions have happened, it won't fit, things will be thrown in in a jumbled style, and there will be empty holes.  The important thing is being able to find a tool quickly.  I just try to subdivide things down to manageable groups and leave it at that.

I gridfinitied my electronics workshop, and really liked it. I made very few custom bins molded to fit my tools and parts, since those are still getting regularly upgraded and replaced. I just printed the boxes, as thin as I could get away with. It took about a weekend per drawer, and I just have the one printer. I wasn’t trying to organize the whole shop, just a drawer at a time, and a lot of the time was just figuring out what went in each drawer.

This is a must watch for people thinking about gridfinity. A lot of the things you said are the reason why I have 5 or 6 gridfinity drawers instead of 20 or 30.

A few things I'd add:
1. In addition to printing time, it's also difficult to keep printers occupied. You're printing a lot of total volume, but it's spread out into lots of area. One thing that made the process a lot faster for me was finding a way to print stacked baseplates so I can have a whole drawer worth printing at once instead of having to come back and reset the printer 6 times.

2. For every specialized holder, I tend to print a plain box of the same X/Y size and a Z height of whatever is left over from the specialized holder. I use the bottom one for duplicates, accessories, refills, etc. Even if I just have a plain tray of mechanical pencils, underneath I know there's a tray of refill leads and replacement erasers.

3. Dial in your print settings. A drawer is going to be a solid day of printing, so make sure you're dialed in. One extra base layer will add a ton of time. Do you need it? A slight settings change might make the same thickness bin walls take two passes instead of three. Slightly reducing infill will reduce print time a lot. Think you might want magnets later (I never have!)? Just including those holes in the bin will increase printing time a lot, even if you never put magnets in the bin.

I wish more people would model and share the item they want to store with gridfinity. That way you could just drop a negative of the item on a gridfinity template in your preferred orientation. We all spend so much time reinventing models.   Sharing your storage solution is nice, but I’d appreciate more a model library of the tools instead.

I've been organizing my shop with Gridfinity for the last month and a half, and I agree with the points here. Especially the one about not biting off too much at a time. Whenever I have a couple free hours I'll pick a tool, knock out a bin for it, slot it into the grid and go back to working on other projects. The way you can get incremental improvements from incremental effort is one of the best features of the Gridfinity system. Even after only a month and a half, though, my shop is noticeably more organized, and far easier to tidy up when I'm done working in there, than it used to be.

Damn, I'm not even 2 minutes in and I'm like "wow. Robert has a LOT of tools. I need more tools ;)"

100% spot on analysis!! I started a GF orginzation project in my shop also thinking it'll maybe be a week and 1.5 months later I have 6 drawers done for all the reasons you mentioned. It's still a very worthwhile project and the great way to analyze, purge, and organize but it's not easy. Thanks for making another great video!

One piece of advice I would give is, don't be afraid to just print some simple bins of various sizes, especially if you are starting from a completely disorganized state. A tool (or group of tools) in a simple bin is already more organized than them just rattling around in a drawer, and you can then make a custom gridfinity holder if you want. The chances are that you'll find a need for that basic bin elsewhere down the line. Basic bins generally print faster than custom holders, and importantly they are already designed, so if you've got a printer sitting idle because you still haven't finished working out a model for the custom holder you are working on, you can set up a print of some simple bins in a few minutes and then get back to desiging.

Your organization is really impressive. Every third drawer in my workshop is a junk drawer...

I love the aesthetic of these bins. Also i am a sucker for shop infra. Love to peer into people's brains like Adam Savage and you.

I have been working on an inventory of everything I own. If it’s not worth putting in the inventory it’s not worth owning. I’ve divested myself of a lot of stuff with that philosophy.

This is borderline ...fill in what you want......wow! I'm impressed. For me it will be manually cutting foam.