How small is too small to keep?

[Greg Peterson]

I just have a hard time throwing scrap wood away. I always justify it by telling myself I very well just need a piece that size or dimension at a later time. Unfortunately, this happens to be true just often enough to validate my thought process.

But it is starting to get a little ridiculous. I've finished building the cabinet for my tube amp and am currently between projects. I suppose now would probably be a good time to 'dump' the scraps.

What do the rest of you guys do, and how often or when?

[mike holden]

My wife and I live in Michigan, and often like a fire in the evenings. Anything in the scrap bin is fair game. I have never run out of scraps, and have never felt like I burned the one and only piece that I needed.
Scraps are like wire hangars, they breed!!
Mike

[Zach England]

What kind of tube amp?

[Bruce Page]

I have to discipline myself to throw all scraps (almost) into a trashcan for later use in the fireplace.

If I had the room I'd probably keep everything.

[James Phillips]

If it is an exotic and can be used as an accent wood I keep it. If it is maple or cherry or oak (anything common) it goes in the scrap bin and either burned or tossed.

[Greg Peterson]

Zach - It's a 5E3 Fender Deluxe.

[Steve Griffin]

How small to keep?

Every shop should keep some very small scraps around. So the answer is "very very small"

I've always thought that question is odd. The real question is how many small scraps to keep, not the size. And the answer to that is related to how big your shop storage is, how likely you will get a project that needs small scraps and how expensive the wood is. So, like many things, it depends.

I have a small shop, and my motto is--"if in doubt, throw it out"

-Steve

[Zach England]

Zach - It's a 5E3 Fender Deluxe.


Oh, THAT kind of amp :). Nevermind...I don't know a thing about those.

[paul cottingham]

Zach - It's a 5E3 Fender Deluxe.
Nice. is it anything like a Fender blues deluxe?

[Britt Lifsey]

My dad used to say if you keep something long enough you will find a use for it.

[Shawn Morley]

I used to keep scraps from job to job, I finally came to the realization that I was wasting my time checking through the pile to find the right piece. I now only keep things through a single job and toss it after that.

[Charles Krieger]

It's lumber until it's sawdust. Then you make compost out of sawdust.

[Greg Peterson]

Paul, the Blues Deluxe is not the same as the Deluxe. The 5E3 is the model number Fender gave their 1953 Deluxe. It is tube rectified, uses a 12AY7 preamp tube instead of the 12AX7, and runs a pair of 6V6 output tubes for about 12-15 watts.

The 5E3 is a very basic circuit. But the tone is pure tube. A handful of resistors, caps and wire (no PCB). Pretty simple as far as amp circuits go.

[Chip Lindley]

Cool Greg! I'd love to see your handiwork. My first-ever woodworking project at age 19 (1968), was to take a Fender SuperReverb bargain (four blown 10" speakers in the cabinet) and make my own "piggyback" enclosure for just the amp portion. Our rock band used it to power our mics through two *ho-made* enclosures with two 12" spkrs, copied from old Bassman dimensions.

I studied how the Fender enclosures were put together with finger-jointed corners, made with rudimentary tools available. After cutting the finger joints by hand, and some serious wood-rasping, everything fit nicely. Corners were rounded over on the local lumber company's shaper. After covered with black pebble-grain vinyl (auto top material) and Fender grill cloth, the sound system looked pretty professional! Although a bit underpowered by todays standards.

Err, Uh, not to hijack this thread, on keeping wood scraps, everything is thrown into a plastic 55 gal. barrel (or 2) with weatherproof lid, stored outside. Often times *the perfect* piece of wood for the *perfect* use, is pulled from storage, rather than cut from new stock. During summer months the barrels usually runneth over. But during wood-burning weather they empty fast! Great kindling for the shop stove!

[Thomas Canfield]

Saving scrap depends on what wood. Hard and exotic woods I tend to save pieces for turning and can use pieces down to 3/4 x 3/4 x 5 for pens (or even a little less) and 3/4" x 2" square for minature bowls. Turning allows using smaller pieces of scrap easier than flat work. I have not gone to segmented pieces yet and don't think I have the patience.

[Paul Atkins]

I'm not sure these were from 'scraps', but there is a lot more where these came from.

[Zach England]

I don't have any way to burn wood but I cannot stand to send perfectly good biomass to the land fill. I once planned on installing a salvaged 19th-century wood burning stove in my house, but the code issues were too onerous.

[Steve Griffin]

I don't have any way to burn wood but I cannot stand to send perfectly good biomass to the land fill. I once planned on installing a salvaged 19th-century wood burning stove in my house, but the code issues were too onerous.

Find someone who does was what I did for years. I also could never landfill solid wood and never have. Now, we're planning a woodstove in the addition, so I box scraps up and put them in the crawlspace.

I've also found two different people with chickens, and they love to take the sawdust.

-Steve

[Frank Drew]

If you can store offcuts somewhere out of your workspace, then you might not have a problem, but if they end up cluttering up your shop you'll have to throw stuff out, even though a lot of it might be perfectly good and would work perfectly for some job, somewhere in the future (that might never come along).

[David Helm]

Steve, putting a bunch of cellulose in the crawl space is a bad idea. You are just inviting various wood destroying and wood eating insects in for dinner.

[John Downey]

I'd say it depends on what you make and how you like to work. Lately I make lots of small stuff and I've blown through a lot of saved scrap. But when I worked in a production shop we would rarely save much less than 15" long by 3" wide and never thinner than 13/16.... The reasoning was that however many you use up, the same project made 6 more, so there's a constant supply. We tended to save anything longer than 15", as they were always useful when making chairs.

[Steve Griffin]

Steve, putting a bunch of cellulose in the crawl space is a bad idea. You are just inviting various wood destroying and wood eating insects in for dinner.


True for most of the country.

Our 9 month high altitude winters pretty much keeps such critters at bay.

Besides, I bet they would rather go after the 1000 sqaure feet of joists/pony walls etc than taped up cardboard boxes. I bet I have half a cord down there already.

-Steve

[Lee Koepke]

I have about 3 boxes that i keep 'scraps' of different sizes in. Makes it easier to sift thru. I use some of them for corner glue blocks, fillers, dead wood, and sometimes some projects. I have enough to do a couple of small clocks and business card holders.

[Karl Brogger]

If I can't identify a use for it in the immediate future, its going in the dumpster.

[Ryan Baker]

I have a few Rubbermaid bins full of various types and sizes of leftovers. The tiny scraps get pitched, but I find that I use quite a lot of the other pieces for everything from clamping blocks to jigs to small parts and everything in-between. It very much depends on the type of work I am currently doing whether the scrap pile is accumulating or depleting. Over time, the remaining bits are of the less useful category and I have to purge through them every so often since space is a big problem in my shop.