This Is A Mandatory Item For Every Car Enthusiast


Bolt drawer, bolt bucket, or junk drawer.  No matter what you call it, it is absolutely imperative that every automotive enthusiast has one of these within reach.  If you don’t, you are basically setting yourself up for heartache & pain.  This particular drawer in my tool box has saved me approximately 470 gallons of gas, several hospital trips, 1 million hours of work, and unimaginable amounts of cash.  Over the last 15 years, it has been cleaned and organized many times, but in the end it always ends up looking like this.  Though I can’t confirm whether it is a good or a bad thing, it is quite possibly the most used drawer in my tool box.  

Each piece inside these bolt buckets have an interesting history, and every enthusiast with one of these collections has a different style to the kind of hardware they save.  Sometimes it’s primarily metric, other times it’s 100% standard, but it is always worth saving.  Mine?  Well, it’s a cornucopia of hardware that may include anything from worthless rusty 1930’s leaf spring bolts, to “extra” bolts for a newer BMW. For the most part, I know where each bolt, nut, grommet, and washer originally came from, and why destiny chose to put them in the special drawer.  Sometimes I keep bolts just to remind myself of how difficult a job was, and what I learned from it.  Others are kept for that panic stricken moment when I need to hack my car back together again in a hurry. 95% of the time, that drawer has exactly what it takes to save the day.  The value of these drawers monetarily speaking is quite low, but to me they are worth their weight in diamonds.

Got the most serious, amazing, organized bolt bucket? Feel like showing off? Send a picture of your junk drawer to me at blog@1aauto.com, and I will post it up here!

Jeremy Nutt

Hi, I'm Jeremy.

18 thoughts to “This Is A Mandatory Item For Every Car Enthusiast”

  1. Jeremy, it look like you were taking a picture of my tool box. The 1157 is in the same place in my box. Have a great day thanks for the pic and God bless.

  2. My drawer has saved me too many times to count. But I don’t have a sprayer nozzle from the can in mine.

  3. If you pickup one of those cheap Harbor Freight parts tumblers you could have the shiniest junk draw in the land.

  4. having possessed 5 motors and 3 interiors in the span of a year, i’m pretty well stocked with fasteners and hardware for my current swap. if it was TTY, it got re-purposed. but i can never seem to find exactly what i’m looking for when I’m looking for it……

  5. I’ve got three buckets and several bins of misc. nuts-n-bolts and still have to make runs, and my local parts house just sends me to the back to find ’em myself. …and who dudn’t have a pile of 1157s…just gotta figure out what to do with ’em!

  6. It would take a few pictures to show my collection. I collect so many buckets of clips, bolts, nuts, washers ect. I have not even used some buckets in a couple of years.

  7. It`s more fun when you got a bunch of collections in different places. All my friends and neighbors know that if they can`t find it or buy it,Dan has got it.

  8. I have at least 4-5 medium sized cardboard boxes full of bolts/hardware real close to my work area that I can access in mere seconds…Then in my shed just 10 feet away from my garage I have a very large Library Card cabinet that my Dad bought at a auction and gave to me…I would put it in my garage but the things weighs so much I would flatten the tires on about anything that could move it! I bet if you could put a price on all the scrounged, new, used, obsolete from work, nuts,bolts,screws,washers,springs,drill bits,clips,rivets,fasteners of all sorts…It would cost $20,000 to replace the collection!!! And I use what I have for sure! My girlfriend once gave me a hard time because when I was building my Turbocharged 1974 Monte Carlo (Blo-thru) I needed a long bolt to hold my home made carb hat on and instead of going to the store I took two bolts from my cabinet cut the head off one and welded the two 5/16″ bolts together to be long enough…I still catch heck over that! But my bolt boxes are priceless.

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