Not Your Run-of-the-Mill Wire Baskets

Common to many different industries that deal with cleaning, degreasing, coating, dipping, and spraying are the wire baskets that hold the parts or pieces that are cleaned, degreased, coated, dipped, and sprayed. AnySizeBasket.com is one e-commerce site where anyone can purchase any number of these baskets–no minimum–in any of the stock materials, shapes, styles, or sizes they have listed. Now, these aren’t the kind of baskets you’d use when going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house (unless, of course, your grandmother runs some kind of industrial-strength cleaning business out of her garage), but they are common tools for many industries, from those that make automobile and aerospace parts, to those that make technological equipment, to those that maintain surgical tools. In addition to the size and shape options, AnySizeBasket offers both carbon steel and 304 stainless steel on this website, as well as several different kinds of handles (rigid vs. swinging, single vs. double, etc.) and multiple sizes and kinds of wire mesh (varying in wire size and hole size, for instance). On their homepage, you can choose from various drop-down lists of specifications to design the specific basket that interests you. As you change options, the picture at the top will adjust to match (except for the size specs), so you can get a rough idea of the finished product. After you’re done making choices, click the “Generate Price List” button, and you’ll get a chart of prices, depending on quantities. From there, you can proceed to order or return to the first page, to try again.

To help you sort through all the various options and determine which are best suited for your project, they even offer a page of answers to questions about wire baskets, in general, as well as questions about their baskets, in particular. They discuss the differences between carbon steel and 304 stainless steel, explain the “natural finish” with which their baskets are shipped, talk about the terms they use to describe the mesh (i.e., “Mesh Number,” “Wire Diameter,” and “Opening Size”), and then cover details of their order process, manufacturing, and shipping.

After some searching through the different drop-down lists and consideration of what they’ve discussed and recommended, if AnySizeBasket.com doesn’t offer the specs for the exact wire basket you need, they provide contact information  for their parent company–Three M Tool–so you can get in touch with somebody who can help you process a custom order.

So, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill wire baskets, although, for those who use them every day, I guess they may become a little less fascinating than for those of us who are just discovering them. I’ll never cease to be amazed by the number of little details that lie behind the scenes of what we less-than-fully-educated consumers consider to be simple processes, if we take the time to consider them at all.