Shopsmith Forums

I finally bit the bullet and cleaned out the shop of odds and ends of solid wood and plywood. Six heavy contractor bags. Yes I tend to be a pack rat. But I still kept some short pieces of wood and plywood pieces around a square foot. You know sometimes you need a small piece of something and you don't want to take 6 or 8 inches off a whole board... so now the question, how do you store those odds and ends?

I picked up a half dozen or so large trash cans. One is marked "oak", and another is marked "walnut", and so on. All the small pieces of hardwood that will fit into the cans even if they stick out a couple of feet will go in there. That way when I need a piece of a particular kind of wood, I need to only look through a single trash can.
Large boards over 6' or so are stacked outside in my garage so I have to go out there if I need larger boards.
Plywood has a rack on one wall of my shop. All extra plywood no matter size or type of wood ends up there.

When I'm smart enough to do it, so not very often, I write the type of wood on the piece. That's necessary because I'm not smart enough to keep all the wood in different places. At least not until now where I have a bounty of heavy duty shelves for storage. That was due to the unfortunate demise of Toys R Us and they were selling out store fixtures in the last few days so I got a bunch of heavy duty shelving. So in the future I'll have separate shelves to lay out wood.

I found the best way, cut each piece to 18 inches and use them a kindling to start fires in the fireplace. I have done wood working for 60 years and every piece of wood that I just could not part with eventually became clutter that I had to get out of my shop. Oh sure from time to time I need some small piece but using a perfect piece of black walnut as a shim or blocking was worst than just burning it, giving it an honorable death.