I have a gallon ziplock bag full of shims stashed away in a drawer. I might add a 2x3" angle iron to the front of the shelf cutting a few 1 1/6" wide 2" deep slots along the 3" leg spaced far enough apart to allow for my largest diameter cutters to remain on an arbor. These would be for quicker access when a milling job required the use of multiple cutter sizes or arrangements, otherwise they would be stored on the studs under the shelf.
The way I look at it, setup time on a project is where money can be made or lost. Back when Jane and I had our machine shop in Ft. Worth a couple of the machine shops geared for production runs only with their CNC machining centers would often send us the things with a too small run count to make it worth their while to set up and make the parts, but they always had allowances included for changeover setups for each different machining operation. We had enough tooling to prearrange all of our changes before starting. An hour spent doing that sometimes could mean saving 20 hours on the contracted project, translated into 19 hours of extra profit which we would split with the shop that sent us the job, giving them the incentive to send us more work. The only way a manual job shop could survive in the world of automatics, was to provide quality, and incentives for repeat business.

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