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The Problem and Solution

My past layouts were largely built with wire I had scavenged from work and other places - the life of working with a skeleton Hobby Budget! I recently had the pleasure to build a layout for a good friend in which we had a budget to cover the cost of construction materials. A quick trip to the local Princess Auto Parts store when they had a generous sale on wire, yielded an impressive supply of coloured spooled wire. Though we would be using DCC for the layout, we had a fair number of "feeders" to install as we wanted to make sure the layout required minimal maintenance in the future so each rail received its own connection to the main power buss. Of course I had the pleasure of spending many an evening under the layout installing these feeders. It didn't take me long to realize, as I chased the latest spool of wire rolling across the floor, that there must be a better way of working with the wire. This Wire Spool Caddy was the result of this learning experience.

Caddy Construction
	This wire caddy was sized to hold the spools we had on hand, app. 10" x 7" x 8". Though tis worked out fine, if I were to do this again, I'd make it about 20% bigger all round to handle larger wire spools. Figure 1 - End View Figure 2 - Front View
	The caddy consists of two ½" dowel rods which together hold about 6 spools. A ¾" dowel is used for the handle and another ½" dowel is used to direct the wire from the upper rod, under the lower and out the front. The front panel comprised of a ½" piece of plywood with a half dozen 3/8" holes. The wire leads from each spool pass through these holes. To ensure the wire doesn't pull out of these holes, I stapled a piece of old bicycle inner tube to the plywood and cut small slits for the wire to feed through. In use, you simply pull the wire from the front and cut off what you need. The remaining portion, will not recede back onto the spool as the rubber will act as a brake. View of rubber "brake". Construction is relatively straight forward (see enclosed diagrams) with all material coming from scraps in the workshop. The base is a piece of ¾" plywood and the uprights are ½" plywood. Cut out all the pieces and drill all holes before assembly. Note that the two dowels that hold the wire spools pass through the side panels while the handle and lower dowel terminate inside the panels. Attach on end panel to the base with some 1 ¼" wood screws and glue (don't forget to pre-drill). Now insert the handle and lower dowel into this first panel with some glue. Add the second panel, with glue in the two dowel holes. Screw and glue in place. Now add the front panel (after you have stapled the rubber to the inside) with glue and nails. All that is left is to cut the two ½" dowels for the wire and to drill holes at each end for the cotter pins. Now install you wire spools on the dowel rods and feed the wire out through the front panel holes. Use a cotter pin at each end of the dowel rods to hold them in place. You are done! Now you have the full compliment of wire spools at your disposal in an easily to move package and there will not longer be the need to chase way ward spools as they roll across the floor!

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