If you work with wood as much as I do, you accumulate a lot of scraps, and if you’re like me you just can’t seem to part with many of them, “They might come in handy for something one day”. I’ve got bins full of scraps, even separate them out by size sometimes and put bigger ones aside for bigger uses, smaller ones for shims or whatever. The smaller ones are most likely going to the burn barrel first though. Eventually I have so many that I have to clean out and begin again, so I have a scrap burning day, or a give away day. I’ve given away truck loads of scraps, and burned as much as well. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure…
What can you make with scraps? I make a lot of games that produce scraps, and one of those games is Backgammon. Scraps make the ‘checkers’ or ‘chips’ you move on the board, the doubling cube that some use in game play, the dice shakers that you roll the dice with, and sometimes the dovetail keys that I decorate the case with on the outside. You have to be creative sometimes to get out of the scraps what you seek, but with a little bit of planning, it can be done.
Another thing you’ll see in my Etsy store is cutting board that have a chaotic pattern. They are end grain boards and look like they’re made with very tiny pieces of wood. They started as scraps and ended up being cut-glued-recut enough times to now look very small. These board really do sell well in some places and serve well in the kitchen. You should use Titebond III to glue them as that is food safe.
Some are pen turners, and small pieces can make some nice pen blanks, you can even cut and glue together some nice wood contrasts that stand out very nicely in a pen sized project.
I’ve also managed to have enough to make a segmented bowl vessel that had no distinct pattern, and looked nice. Of course at some point, the pieces get too small and too many…they have to go to the burn pile or use as starter wood for the fireplace. But the fire is the hardest for me to do, as those very beautiful pieces, no matter how small, seem to reach out and say “Make something of me”.
I worked with a friend on some kitchen cabinets using cherry, he was laying out the boards for cutting parts and I saw far too much waste in his plan. I suggested rethinking his layout, and created a plan that saved all but maybe 5% of each board used. He was accepting 20% waste. I am far too stingy for that, and you have to be when using expensive exotics. When we finished the cabinet project, he had enough lumber left over (based on his 20% scrap rate) to make a pretty large project. He originally thought that the scraps would not be big enough to really do anything with, yet we had several boards we never touched. I think we both learned a lot about saving materials in that project, and we both learned that we can make more money when we use the wood more efficiently.
So I think we’ll spend the day working with a huge scrap pile that needs to go…into something useful.
These scraps are some of the best off the top of my pile. I did not do a deep dive for this project, but the scraps used here are from the last three or four months of projects. I do a lot of projects, I go through a lot of material, and produce quite a lot of scrap material. I don’t like wasting it. Very little goes in to the burn bin right away. Let’s get going with machining and some assembly of panels.
This next video does not have audio on purpose, just a look at assembling a different panel. The same methods are employed and the only real difference is the selection of wood and length of the overall panel.
After the panels dry for a few minutes I like to scrape off the glue that squeezes out, it makes machining later much easier. The glue needs to be skinned over and a bit set, but not hard.
The upcoming posts are going to show machining the panels (there are four) and then cutting and reassembly for our first panel mock-up.
Day two: Panel flattening with a planer.
I’ve got the panels ready to plane, they’re glued and are in need of flattening for use as an end-grain board glue-up. This video has no sound, too noisy in the shop for more than a visual.
This video is the beginning of the flattening process. One of the boards I assembled had a huge cup in the center, likely due to a non-squared edge and required my cutting that panel in two and dressing the two edges and re-gluing them together. Not a big deal for scraps, but would be a huge deal for a chess board glue-up. Here’s the stock going through the planer for the first few times, cutting small amounts and not in a hurry.
Next I dress up the panels and cut off any extra’s that I cannot use, or bad spots that have shown up in the dressing process. This video clip also has no sound.
Next I’m going to cross cut the panels for face-gluing them to expose end-grain.
After we crosscut the panels we have to clean up fuzzy edges, a light sanding will do with a block sanding pad, and then we re-arrange them in a random order. I like to pay attention to any perceived pattern and avoid them. Once those panels are sorted I’ll glue up some panels that are about the size blank that I can plane, I ended up with four panels and now read to edge glue them together.
These blanks have dried, been planed a little bit and re-cut again across the panels. This next video is sorting the boards again into a nearly final size. They will be cut one more time but this time I have 5 boards.