How to connect 1,000 strips of wood

[Brian Kent]

My secretary's husband has a business that on a regular basis has leftover pieces of 3/8" Russian/Baltic Birch Plywood 5' long and 3-3/4" wide. She asked if I wanted some. How many? 12,000 now, another 12,000 later.:D :eek: :confused:

How can I pass it up?
How can I use it?

Then I started thinking about my garage cabinet project. A total of 30 feet of floor to ceiling cabinets (to keep sawdust off of our starage stuff).

I could glue several layers thick for structural pieces and connect multiple strips side by side for the panels of a frame and panel construction. I figure I need to connect up to 1,000 strips side by side.

How would you do this?

A) Table saw using a dado with spacer for one side and a slot for the other side (except I have a fine kerf blade and that makes for one very thin slot).

B) Table mounted router (the weakest link in my shop, with a ryobi router and $59 table from home depot mounted into a table). If so, what router bit?

C) A pair of rounding and hollow planes:
http://www.japanwoodworker.com/product.asp?s=JapanWoodworker&pf_id=98.120.1037&dept_id=13602

D) The world's most careful chisel work… over and over and over.

F) Things I don't know yet because I am so totally new at this.



I figure I will use up to 3,000 pieces of baltic birch ply if I do this project. Maybe I can build a house with the other 21,000 pieces.

[Lee DeRaud]

I seem to recall someone on this forum made a workbench out of pieces roughly that size, epoxied up like a chunk of bowling alley. Looked good and was very strong/stable...also insanely heavy.

[Dan Gill]

Why not just stagger pieces and glue into 3/4 inch sheets? If the edges are square, you wouldn't have any gaps to speak of.

The only downside I can see is that it's going to be very labor- and glue-intensive.

[Cary Swoveland]

My secretary's husband has a business that on a regular basis has leftover pieces of 3/8" Russian/Baltic Birch Plywood 5' long and 3-3/4" wide...

How can I use it?...

I'd consider laminating the pieces to construct curved forms, making the edges a design feature. Anybody know what the minimum radius would be with 3-3/4" wide x 3/8" thick BB ply? Could that be reduced by steaming, or some other technique (not to hijak thread)?

Cary

[Tom Jones III]

I would try and do an estimate for how much glue you are going to end up using. Also think about how many clamps you have, that could slow down the glue-up process. This may end up costing more than if you would have bought the wood new.

[Howard Rosenberg]

In between the other elements of your lifestyle, do you feel you get enough shoptime?

When you DO get shoptime is your preference projects or jigs?

I'm going to assume you'd like more shoptime.

Why horse around gluing up little pieces?

IMNTHO, just buy the supplies/materials you actually need to do this project, finish it and go on to the next one.

My 2C.
Howard (they call him cranky) Rosenberg

[Larry Fox]

How would you do this?


Brian, being perfectly honest and not trying to be a Wise-A but my answer to the above question would be - I wouldn't.

It seems like a good idea in theory but I think for a hobby guy with a hobby shop (such as most of us are and have), the task of gluing thousands of ANYTHING will get overwhelming very quickly and consume a tremendous amount of time.

An interesting experiment will be to assign some reasonable dollar value to an hour of your time and glue ONE up and see how long it takes you. Now multiply that by the number you have to do. Take that number and compare it to the cost of materials you don't have to glue up.

Edit: Howard and Tom beat me to it.

[Doyle Alley]

I don't know about piecing them together to make bigger pieces, but it sounds like you've got the material for a lifetime's worth of jigs and fixtures.

[Brian Kent]

One thing for sure, I'm not going for Gorilla Glue. Can you imagine scraping 30 feet of cabinets??

Another method to my madness is to learn to make frame and panel doors - practicing where I can afford to mess up.

I could double up the 3/8 inch ply to make the rails and stiles, cut a slot with a dado blade, then slide in the panel boards.

Then I can use just plain old lumber for the frame.

[Jim Becker]

I wouldn't try and glue this stuff up for panels...especially when you can buy 18mm BB ply for reasonable prices in most cases. But I'd accept the material to be used in projects, anyway. 3" strips of BB can be very, very handy for so many things, both in cabinet construction as well as other shop uses. Oh, and if you can get a hold of an edge-bander, you could do rails and stiles with them quite nicely... ;)

[John Schreiber]

An interesting experiment will be to assign some reasonable dollar value to an hour of your time and . . .
If I did that, I couldn't afford anything I build:confused:.

Back to the original question. I would love to have a couple hundred pieces like that. I'm sure over time, I could make them into shop jigs and other things. But if I tried to use them to make bigger pieces of wood, I'll bet I'd start to hate it after a short time.

[Matt Lentzner]

Sounds like a lifetime supply of torsion box material. You could make the mother of all meeting room tables.:D

Matt

[Larry Fox]

If I did that, I couldn't afford anything I build:confused:.


Correct - nor could I. However, building something has intrisic value in that you enjoy it and are proud of the result. How enjoyable is gluing up thousand's of pieces of plywood likely to be?

[frank shic]

brian, you could use that material to make decent drawer boxes but i would NEVER try gluing them back together - how would you ever sand the reconstructed sheet flat?

[Brian Kent]

I don't know if I have ever heard such unanymous agreement on a topic!:D

[Greg Cole]

Hey Brian,
Good point there. Maybe it's b/c nobody has mentioned any tool brands! LOLOLOL
Sorry, mile off topic but still funny.

Greg

Oh yeah, I'd pass on the regluing thing too. Many uses for some small pieces but not THAT many.

[Brian Kent]

OK, Greg, let's give it a try.

Which tool would be better to scrape the gorilla glue squeeze-out off of 5000 feet of birch-ply, a Lie-Nielsen Large Scraper plane or a Lee Valley Scraping Plane with an A2 blade?

That should get us going!;)

[Glen Gunderson]

Now math was never my strong point, but if I'm figuring correctly, that is a LOT of wood!

Each piece is .375" (3/8), by 3.75", by 60". So that's 84.375 cubic inches, which equals .0488 cubic feet (84.375 divided by 1728 cubic inches). Now if you multiply that by the 24,000 pieces, that comes out to around 1171 cubic feet of wood.

If you piled that 4 feet high and 6 feet wide, the pile would have to be around 49 feet long. Or put another way, at 4 feet high, you would need almost 300 square feet of floor space to store it. I can see why this guy wants to get rid of it!

Perhaps if he is getting rid of it anyway, you could grab a few hundred pieces that you might put to good use. But if I were you, there's absolutely no way I'd take to the whole batch.

[Brian Kent]

I could sell half, buy a piece of land, then use the other half to build a storage shed, but then I would be all out of wood to store:confused: .

[David Giles]

Free fuel! You could heat your house. BB burns pretty clean in a campfire, and the size is just right for a stove.

[Todd Jensen]

Your post title sounds like a Chinese riddle. If you've just arrived on Devil's Island and have 50 years to kill, I'd say get started. Otherwise, I just want to whole-heartedly agree with those who've said ignore this opportunity. Thank goodness for my wife that made me get rid of the 3 project lawn mowers, the extra scrap wood, etc... her efforts helped me reclaim my shop.
As a professional stair guy, I get lots of cutoffs of nice wood. When I was starting out as a finish carpenter, I'd grab it all. Now, I grab the clean stuff that will burn nice and leave the rest unless I've currently got another project that I can use it on. Its very difficult still for me to let perfectly good wood go to waste, but the sad truth is I dont' have the space to store it or the time to do anything with it. After cleaning out the clutter from these past 'opportunities', I now have time to fab upgrades for my atv and do wood projects - one at a time.
You would waste so much valuable time gluing these scraps into workable wood - my guess is you might get through the project, but by its end you'd be wanting to burn it all and quit woodworking altogether. I liked the posts that said to take the time to figure your time and glue and clamp expenses to make these cabinets - if you still want to proceed after taking the hour or so for that 'bid', take another hour to think again. :) I'm sure you'd be way better off buying some at a local big box store.

Just my 2 pennies on the pile... woodworking is challenging enough without having to make the wood in the first place.

[Loren Hedahl]

Advertise them on e-bay. Sell them one-at-a-time and retire with a guaranteed income!

Loren

[Stephen McClaren]

Could use some of it for a slat wall, the rest for fire wood.

[nic obie]

Advertise them on e-bay. Sell them one-at-a-time and retire with a guaranteed income!

Loren


Hahahahahahahaaa

Now you're talking! :D :D :D

[Jim O'Dell]

I think the best use of these would be for the interior pieces of a torsion box, like Matt said, and secondly for drawer side material like Frank mentioned. Not sure I'd burn it if it's ply just from the glue burning aspect. You could use some to glue together for small projects, but if you will need to do any shaping with a router, I'd bet the glue would be hard on bits.
I'd take as much as I thought I could reasonably store and not be in my way. But I'm with the others on guing it up for larger pieces...way to labor intensive. Jim, who's back to cutting his sheet of birch ply for drawer sides and bottoms.

[Keith Cope]

I have seen some fairly large pieces made of large expanses of glued up strips of plywood--they'd be perfect for that sort of thing if you like the aesthetic! Sounds like something fun to experiment with at any rate!