How small is too small to keep?

[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.