Shadow Board Tool Control

What are a Shadow Board, FOD Tool Control and FOD Bag?

You’ve most likely seen a shadow board in a garage workshop or auto repair shop. The outlines of all the available tools have been drawn on a board to show where each tool goes.  The intent follows the lines of the old adage ” A place for everything, and everything in it’s place.”  The shadow board system worked to help organize placement of tools, as well as putting the tools where they could be chosen without searching each time they were needed.

The concept of the shadow board naturally transferred to industrial areas where tool location began a matter of safety, not just convenience.  Especially in the aerospace industry, certainty that all tools were accounted for after a repair was completed took on a similar urgency as a doctor making sure that no surgical instruments were left in the patient before stitching the body closed.  A tool that is accidentally left in the vicinity of a jet engine can be sucked into the powerful motors and stop them in mid-air, putting hundreds of lives at risk. Foreign Object Damage or FOD Control is one of the top safety concerns in the aerospace industry, since tools are only one of the possible dangers to a jet engine.

The need for FOD tool control has spawned a variety of systems to make sure that errant tools do not cause any in-flight disasters.  An FOD bag is part of the back-up systems that are found on every airline repair site.  Since an airplane is usually repaired in the open air, the concept of shadow boards transferred into tool drawer organization, or tool kit organizers. With the many shapes and sizes of industry specific tools, have fitted drawer liners to contain the tools was a costly and time consuming expense.

PlaSteel has developed a new, cost effective way of tool kit organization. The Shadow Box is a photographic system that arrives at the tool site, photographs the tools in their correct placement in the tool drawers, then is used to cut the tool drawer liners. Using the Shadow Box system saves time and money, delivering the tool drawer liners quickly at a fraction of the cost of having them hand cut. In addition, PlaSteel has an unprecedented Buy Back system, which can be applied to having new liners cut when a new liner is needed.  To see the entire FOD Tool Control presentation, click here. For more information about this unique system of FOD  Control or to see FOD bag possibilities, call PlaSteel at 888-752-7899.