How Small is Too Small?

I had a friend that had a vending machine business that used the gravity method of determining which portion of the income from the machines went to the govt and which portion he kept.  At the end of the day he would take the proceeds of his collections and throw it all up in the air, what stayed up he sent to the government, what came down he kept.  I applied that method to the wood scraps in my little shop and had a marvelous collection of bits of wood of all shapes and a lot of sizes that amused my grandkids and greatgrandkids for hours building whatever.

What to keep depends on what projects you like to do. The scraps can be glued up randomly or in patterns for boards or blanks for small boxes flatwork or turned. They can also be used for small projects.
Small sticks used as drum sanders on the lathe.

Scraps turned into beads for a curtain project.

Used for components in a rack for my lathe tools.


Made from a box of scraps given to me by a friend who passed away a few months later.

Only your time & imagination define the usefulness of scraps.

I donate my scraps to my woodturning club.  Someone there will make use of them for pens, tops or other small items.  By donating, I do not have to bear the burden of throwing them away.

Lately, however, I have been making a lot of inlay/inserts for turned boxes.  That means almost every scrap should be saved 

Make fire palaces. We used to take all our little scraps (and whatever big or oddly shaped ones we had lying around) and nail them together to make fire palaces, some as tall as five or six feet, which we would then stand up in a fire ring, fill with kindling, and torch. Then we'd make bets as to how long the structure would take to collapse. You can get pretty creative with scraps, especially curvy bandsaw scraps.

Of course, anything that might have use for inlay or knobs or pegs or whatever would go into a bucket in the shed.

Ellis

Ellis Walentine wrote:

Of course, anything that might have use for inlay or knobs or pegs or whatever would go into a bucket in the shed.

Ellis

I spent some time last night trying to find all of the little stuff that was scattered on/in/around the lumber rack and piled all of it on the workbench. My bits of good stuff, the sort your say might be good for inlays and such, weren't there as I segregated them previously. I need to scout around the rest of the shop and see what else turns up. Right now I can't see the top of the bench and if I am not careful about what I categorize the whole bench might disappear. I'm thinking that when this is done, assuming I can finish, there will be quite a heap that can to in the fireplace on the first cool Autumn evening. I think that this is more of a mental/emotional problem than a clutter problem.

My grandkids all have major league Janga sets in walnut, maple, and cherry.  I don't do inlay beyond the occasional butterfly.   With no local wood club to which to donate,  I choose to send the flotsom to the landfill to the tune of a 10 gal bucket once a month rather than releasing the carbon via the fireplace.  Wood dust gets fed to the trees or mulches the azaleas.

I too am a wood hoarder.  It has finally dawned on me that the scraps will never go away.  I try to use as many as I can and do use lots of them but every project generates more.  I can't remember them them ever dwindling away except when my son was about 12 and realized the fireplace was real and he enjoyed endless fires and got to the point he was burning the good stuff.  The fireplace is decommissioned and that is no longer a possibility.  On one occasion I sent a huge batch of pen blanks to somebody in Alaska.  Never heard from him again, no thank you, nothing.  Fagedaboutit.  Now I am trying to be a little more ruthless about throwing stuff away and making stuff like cutting boards and smalls. What I am trying to say is I have no help for you.

Keep them all. You never know when you might need contrasting (or matching) wood for fox wedges. That's my story - and I'm sticking to it. LOL

When pondering the question, "How small is too small?" in cleaning, finding the perfect balance between thoroughness and efficiency is critical. Cleaning tasks can vary widely in scale, from tidying up a cluttered desk to tackling a massive industrial facility. 

gossi123 wrote:

When pondering the question, "How small is too small?" in cleaning, finding the perfect balance between thoroughness and efficiency is critical. Cleaning tasks can vary widely in scale, from tidying up a cluttered desk to tackling a massive industrial facility. 

My shop, in the state that it had entered, would probably be on the industrial facility end of the spectrum. I'm at the point now where I can actually walk across the shop without having to move something out of the way and the lighting is now good enough to see where I'm going. Sadly the bench is still covered in little pieces of wood that I don't know what to do with and what is piled there is not all of it. I'm starting to think that, come the first cold night of winter (assuming that it ever gets cold, what with the climate mutating) I might just shut down the HVAC and light big fires in both fireplaces and cut my losses.

I am not that good at it, but one guideline is how easy it will be to replace the piece.  Then there is that thing where I start to recognize odd little pieces. If they get too familiar, to the point where a naming ceremony might be appropriate, time to move in for the kill.

This is one of those things where being an amateur is much more difficult.  I make everything.  There is no possibility that I could devise a wall rack of tubes, or something to hold all my valuable offcuts.  There is no way of knowing which ones will prove to be valuable.  I just muddle through.