Keep Circular Saw Blades & Other Tools Organized With A Garage Storage Hack

There's a highbrow big-city magazine cartoon in this somewhere. In the foreground, a child looking for cookies in a tin finds grandma's sewing kit. In the background, grandma is looking for her sewing kit and finds her husband's circular saw blades. Not funny, granted, but those cartoons never are. What they have is observational truth, and it's certainly true that people have been storing sewing supplies in Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookie tins for generations. What we've just discovered is that those cookie tins also happen to be perfectly sized for storing circular saw blades in the two most common sizes: 7 ¼ inches and 10 inches.

Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookie tins have been used to store sewing supplies for about 80 years, and similar tins are used throughout most of the world. While there are many ways to repurpose cookie tins around the house, this storage solution is not limited to butter cookie containers. Since it's hard to believe that anyone would buy $40 worth of tartlets from stores like the Gluten Free Palace just to have a place to keep saw blades, we looked around to see what's involved in hiding saw blades after the cookie hideout has been compromised.

Circular saw blades  — and here we're including saws, like table saws, that use standard disc blades — come in a wide variety of sizes, the most common being 7 ¼ inches (the standard hand-held circular saw) and 10 inches (usually table saw blades). Dado stacks (maybe the best case for tin storage) commonly come in 6 and 8-inch diameters. It also makes sense to consider angle grinder wheels, since there's a much larger variety of wheel types than saw blades, meaning there's more to store. So there's a range of tin sizes that can be used for blade storage, starting at about 3 inches. Avoid tins with a narrowed mouth, which effectively changes the diameter of things that can be stored within. The lid should stay on but not be too tight-fitting, and keep in mind that tins that are too large will work just fine.

Unfortunately, companies don't generally publish the diameters of the tins their products come in. But all manner of products come in metal tins, including flea collars, tea, potato chips, various cosmetics, and every conceivable form of sweet. Then, there are the endlessly useful popcorn tins that you can repurpose around the house. You can buy the tins themselves from Amazon and other retailers. Though it can be difficult to find them by diameter without purchasing in volume, they are considerably cheaper without the flea collars and ointments. Or, just swipe grandma's Royal Dansk tin. That sewing kit can go into mason jars, anyway.