Gridfinity Is Great at Storing Things. Here's How to Also Find Them.

By Darren, founder August 15, 2026 Updated October 17, 2026 7 min read GridfinityMakers3D printing

If you've printed more than about fifty Gridfinity bins, you've hit it: a beautiful drawer, perfectly tessellated, and no idea which bin has the thing. Here's the missing layer.

What Gridfinity gets right

Gridfinity — Zack Freedman's open standard for 3D-printed storage — works because it fixes the unit. Every bin is some multiple of 42 mm, every baseplate is a grid of those units, and so anything fits anywhere. It's the first small-parts system that's genuinely modular rather than “modular” in the marketing sense.

The side effect is that people make a lot of bins. Bins are cheap, printing is fun, and the drawer looks amazing. And then you have 200 bins that all look the same from the top and a growing suspicion that the M3 heat-set inserts are “somewhere on the left”.

The missing layer: a map that speaks Gridfinity units

Because Gridfinity is a grid, it maps perfectly onto a grid-based inventory. A drawer with a 6 × 4 baseplate is a 6-column × 4-row layout. A 2 × 1 bin is a merged cell. A 1 × 1 bin is a single cell. If you can describe the drawer in Gridfinity units, you can describe it exactly in WhichDrawer — no approximation, no “misc” cells.

A 6×5 Gridfinity fastener drawer in WhichDrawer: photo of the orange-and-grey bins on top, the 22-bin layout mapped below with merged cells for the 2×2 bearings bin and the 2×1 lead-screw bin, and item counts on every bin
A 6 × 5 baseplate, mapped unit for unit: 22 bins, two of them merged cells, 26 items. This layout is the “Gridfinity 6×5 Fastener Drawer” template in the app.
  1. Photograph the drawer from directly above. Good light, drawer fully open. This becomes the organizer's cover.
  2. Draw the baseplate grid (6 × 4, 8 × 5, whatever you printed) and merge cells to match your larger bins.
  3. Add what's in each bin as an item with a photo. Bins that hold several part sizes get several items with per-bin quantities, and custom fields (thread pitch, length, bin height, whatever you actually sort by) hold the details a name can't.
  4. Search by photo when you can't name it. Hold the mystery hex standoff up to the camera; the app returns the closest matching item and its bin.
WhichDrawer AI Visual Search results for a photo of a bin of ball bearings: two likely matches, 608ZZ ball bearings and F623 flanged bearings, both in the Gridfinity fastener drawer's Bearings bin
Photograph the mystery bearing; the drawer and bin come back
An item detail screen in WhichDrawer answering 'Where is it?' for 608ZZ ball bearings: the Bearings bin on the 3D printing bench, two photos and a category
“Where is it?” — bench, drawer, bin, quantity

Layout tools + inventory

If you planned the drawer in a Gridfinity layout tool, you already have the grid — recreate it in WhichDrawer in a minute (custom layouts go up to 12 × 12; bigger baseplates can be split into two organizers, left half / right half). We're exploring direct import from popular layout tools; if you'd use that, tell us which one.

Bin labels vs. a searchable index

Gridfinity has a fantastic label ecosystem — click-in labels, embossed lids, printed tags. Use them. But labels answer “what is in this bin?” when you're already standing at the drawer. An index answers the harder question — “which drawer, and which bin?” — from the other end of the shop, or from the hardware store when you can't remember whether you already have M4 × 12 socket heads. Low-stock alerts on the consumables (inserts, magnets, filament swatches) are the cherry on top.

WhichDrawer's Reorder tab for a 3D-printing bench: six items to restock, isopropyl wipes out of stock, and brass nozzles, magnets and flanged bearings below their minimums, each with a Find button
The consumables write their own shopping list: nozzles, magnets and bearings running low, the IPA wipes already gone.

A note on Multiboard, HSW and other systems

Everything above applies to any grid-based system: Multiboard bins, Honeycomb Storage Wall, Alexandre Chappel's assortment boxes, or plain Akro-Mils cabinets. If it's a grid, it maps. See the Drawer Organizer Guide for grid dimensions of common commercial cabinets.

WhichDrawer is free for one organizer — enough to map your first Gridfinity drawer and decide whether the missing layer was worth adding.

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Darren builds WhichDrawer, an app born from a childhood spent staring at his father's 64-drawer parts cabinet and never quite trusting the labels. Learn more.