Hansen socket trays

Organize your sockets for quick use and to make sure you didn't lose any.

I get pretty mad when I have to dig and sort through my socket drawer. I get even madder when I leave a socket in a car or gosh forbid, inside a Harley.

A key part of working with tools is making sure you know where they are. Also making sure they don't drive away because you left them under the cowl or on the radiator support.

These Hansen trays organize your socket sets. They come in SAE and metric for 1/4-, 3/8-, and 1/2-inch drive. The little pegs have the size on them, so it is easy to select the socket you want. The base of the peg is sized to match the socket, so you can't put a bigger size on a smaller pin. Highly recommended.

This is my socket drawer in the garage after the Hansen socket trays. Its hard to believe all this room and organization is in the same drawer. Red trays are SAE. Gray are metric.

The Craftsman set I populated this with had no metric deep-wells, and just a handful of 1/4" drive SAE deep-wells. Somehow somewhere I got a set of metric "E" type sockets. The are like backwards Torx. I hate them just as much as Torx. I dropped them in the deep-well metric spots.

This was the sorry state of my socket drawer before the Hansen trays. This is not the main set in my toolbox in the shop. Its an extra set I keep in the garage for simple Sportster maintenance. The black blow-molded plastic tray is from Craftsman. It has the goofiest selection and organization you can imagine.

Here is a full set of Hansen socket trays. The cost about 60 bucks including the shipping. That is probably more than the Craftsman sockets, but at least Hansen has not cheapened their brand to crap. Use caution, Amazon has about 9 vendors spread across three different pages. (1, 2, 3). I clicked on the wrong one as I sifted through them all and paid 80 bucks instead of 50 bucks.

The really cool thing about the Hansen socket trays are that the pegs have the sizes marked on them. You are sure to get the size that you want. This is really handy since socket sets are not uniform, a 1/4 drive set sure does not start and end with the same sizes as a 3/8 set.

This is the craptastic Craftsman tray. There is no sense whatsoever to the organization-- it took until I put I the Hansen trays to see they put in 6- and 12-point 1/4" drive, but left out all kinds of other sizes.

The Craftsman set had laughably few 1/2" drive sockets and no deep wells. The trays were too big to fit in the drawer. I will stash them someplace until I get a proper roll-around tool box in the garage. The 1/4 drive bar and 3/16 socket you see were duplicates so those go in my kitchen drawer. Now I will keep my eye out for sockets at the flea market to fill out the trays.

Here is the drawer from my main toolbox at the shop. The Hansen sets really do a great job. I wish I had a nice a way to store all the other sockets, like Allen and swivel. This makes using the tools a pleasure.

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Hansen socket trays

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