Custom Tool Control Foam

A tool control programme fails in one of two places: either the tools have no assigned home, or the home is so hard to read that nobody checks. Shadow foam fixes both. Every tool gets one pocket, and because the foam is two layers in contrasting colours, a missing tool is a bright shape rather than something you have to notice.

What you get

An insert per drawer or per case, cut from laminated two tone foam, with one pocket per tool and a finger relief so tools can actually be lifted out. Pockets can be numbered to match your control register. The bottom layer is a contrasting colour, so the shape of anything absent reads at a glance and from a distance.

What we do not do is sell you a layout designed around a kit we happen to stock. The normal job here is a drawer that already has tools in it, and the layout is drawn around what is in front of us.

How it works, start to finish

1. Send the tool list, or send the tools

Best case, you send a photograph of the drawer as it stands plus the internal dimensions and usable depth. Part numbers help. If a tool is unusual, or if there is any doubt about how it sits, send the tool itself and the layout is drawn from the object rather than from a drawing of it.

2. We draw the layout and you approve it

You get a drawing back, usually within three working days, showing every pocket in position. This is the moment to change your mind: moving a pocket on a drawing costs nothing and moving it after cutting costs a sheet of foam. Nothing is cut until you have approved it.

3. It is cut, checked and shipped

Manufacturing runs 10 to 15 working days from approval. Every insert is checked against the drawing before it ships, and where you have sent us the tools, checked against the tools.

Material, and the Skydrol question

Standard grade is cross linked polyethylene, closed cell, which shrugs off water, oil and most solvents and holds an edge when cut. It is the right answer for the great majority of drawers.

It is the wrong answer for a hydraulics bay. Skydrol is a phosphate ester hydraulic fluid, and it attacks materials that are perfectly happy in engine oil. Ordinary foam exposed to it goes soft, then tacky, and at that point it has stopped being a tool control measure and started being a contamination source. If a trolley or a drawer sees Skydrol, say so at the enquiry stage and it is specified in a resistant grade.

Standard colour pairs are black over high visibility yellow, and black over orange. Other pairs are available and are worth asking about if your shop already colour codes by trade or by zone.

Thickness

The usable depth of the drawer decides this more than the tools do. A 50 mm insert in a 45 mm drawer does not close.

Where it pays for itself

Three places, in the order shops usually notice them.

The tool check gets shorter. A drawer with shadowed pockets is checked by looking at it. Sonic Tools USA publish a figure of 78 per cent faster inventory with numbered foam inlays, and an 80 per cent reduction in misplaced tools. Those are their measurements on their own kit rather than ours, and they are quoted here as the industry claim they are.

FOD risk drops. The Boeing estimate that foreign object damage costs global aviation around four billion dollars a year gets quoted by every supplier in this market. What matters operationally is narrower: a tool you cannot account for is a tool that might be in an aircraft, and that is an AOG decision rather than a housekeeping one.

The audit gets easier. Under Part-145 you need a tooling control system with an identification and labelling scheme, and an auditor who can see the scheme working in a drawer asks fewer follow-up questions than one reading about it in a manual. Our EASA Part-145 tool control guide sets out what is actually being checked.

Pricing, honestly

Priced per layout. A drawer of twelve spanners and a drawer of sixty avionics tools are not the same amount of work, and quoting them at the same figure would be a fiction. What drives the price is the number of pockets, the material grade, the thickness, whether pockets are numbered and how many identical copies you need.

Repeats are much cheaper than the first one. If you are foaming a fleet of identical trolleys, say so in the enquiry, because the layout is drawn once.

There is no minimum order. A single drawer is a job we will quote.