craftsman never blame their tools

This morning we had a training day. I am very pleased with the results. We focused on the three tool centers in the shop. If you can imagine, the tools of our shop have a natural entropy, and believe me it is not organized. We have many tools to get our work done thousands of little different tools needing to be used at different times. We need to be able to locate these tools quickly and when we need them. So I have made three pairs of tool boxes. Each pair is located strategically and has the exact same configuration. Everything that a craftsman needs is in each pair. It is a pretty good system until you need something that is not in one of those boxes. For example Gagan asked me this week for a hack saw. I know I have several hack saws, but they are not in the tool box, just doesn't come up. We had to search for it. So today was spent going over the contents of the tools and their respective locations in the boxes. We had to make some modifications to two other boxes so they are similar and then we matched up all the tools. I still need to buy two more large routers and two more trim routers with their respective bit sets, for the pairs to be identical. Most of my back-up tooling is out on the floor now. I'll have to re-up soon. HD Chasen out of somerville is where I do most of my wheelin and dealing tool wise. They have everything imaginable and most of it is in stock. The owner was nice enough to come over to my shop and make a tool list with me listing all the tools and their order numbers. I can easily monitor what tools we are using most and are re-ordering, and that way I can add that expense to the job cost. New tooling is something that we will always need, I want to know that we have budgeted a certain amount of money constantly to new tooling. The staff then knows that new tools are always coming. that is important to craftsman, having good tools. It is said that a craftsman never blames his tools for shotty work, and I agree with that, but man let me tell you that it is easier to do good work with good tools. And well organized tools that you are familiar with. Sondu came in today for the event and helped out that was really nice. Sondu actually had some good ideas about tool location in the boxes and also the idea of adding a location for bungs. You are the idea man around hear sondu and we do miss you. The whole event took about 2 hours and was worth every cent of our time. I'm so proud that we as a team are taking the time for the kaizen events and the training days. I know it's hard to see the improvement now because it's early wait a few years from now at how are operation will perform and you'll see the progress as plain as day.