Protecting Tools in a Wooden Box

I live about a mile from the ocean and my garage shop is not heated. Wood is good. No preservative I’ve ever tried is bulletproof. I leave all my collets in the little plastic containers they come in. They never rust. Desiccant is ok, but they get saturated and you can’t tell by looking at them if they are still working. I get my raw steel blanks deburred and lightly ground and they used to be impossible to keep rust free until I did two things. There are plastic totes at Target that have a rubber seal around the top and that helped. But then I found these:


stick one of these somewhere in the box not in contact with the collets(it will stain metal if contacted) and close the lid. I’ve had stuff in the tote out in the garage for 4yrs now, no rust. Period. They never seem to wear out or quit working.
 
Traditional wood finishes are boiled linseed oil (good, and it penetrates, and repels moisture, but
it takes a week or so to cure), and shellac (very fast drying; an hour after applying, it's ready to
put the collets back in). The Minwax oil finishes (stains) are faster than linseed oil but
achieve the same result; I'd consider an oil stain with a wipe-on or spray shellac overcoat.

Regular old oil does not polymerize and stay put in the wood, isn't much of a finish.
 
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