Tool Bar Magnet Organizer (Customizable)

Upgrade your cheap Harbor Freight bar magnet to better organize your tools! 

I've never liked bar magnets for tools as they always become cluttered with tools overlapping making it hard to remove. To solve that I've designed a fully customizable holder for your cylindrical objects - great for drill bits, router bits, bit sets, screw drivers, or anything with a shaft and is metal. Everything pictured was generated with this project.

It is designed to be super fast and easy to print. It is secured to the bar magnet with double sided tape, so if you ever want to change it up they just pop off and you can stick new ones on. If you're woodworking and don't already have pressure tape, get some its incredibly handy. You could also just rely on the tools to hold it to the magnet, as long as you don't remove every item.

You can edit the model online here at MakerWorld or download the file and use OpenSCAD.

I've designed the model in OpenSCAD so it is fully customizable. Click the customize button to open the editor where you can easily change parameters to generate new STL files. You can change how many grooves there are, the size of the grooves, spacing between grooves, the height/width of the holder to give better support, and a bunch of other parameters. It's extremely versatile. 

The defaults work well for a lot of things, but you should play around and custom design for your specific tools. Since they are cheap and fast to print, you can always swap them out later as you want to move tools around without much waste.

This is inspired by Rob Cowan's video but he ditches the bar magnet as he didn't get good holding results. I designed this to get the tool as close to the holder as possible, often touching since I expose part of the metal, and have had good strength results. He ditched it and went with neo-magnets, which for larger tools is great (and I made hundreds of my own neo magnet holders) but this is a much cheaper solution for lots of small items like bits.

Specifically designed for the Harbor Freight bar magnet but if it doesn't fit just tweak the advanced options. All in it cost me less than $1 to print enough holders for the entire bar magnet. Often times you can get them on sale or as a free item, so pretty economical way to organize your tools.

Advanced Users

I added the ability to specify the widths for each holder. This is useful for tools like router/spade/forstner bits where some tools need more horizontal space. This is specified as a comma spliced string such as “16,16,20,30”. It overrides all other spacing/width settings. It also override the count_holder setting and generate as many widths that you specify.

OpenSCAD Parameters

Advanced settings: These settings you may need to change if you're using a different brand bar magnet.