Shopsmith Forums

I mentioned sometime ago that I am accumulating boxes of scrap wood cutoffs faster than I am accumulating
finished products.

Well-after pondering what to do beside burning in the firepit, I hit on a simple project to make something kind of useful out
of those spent pieces.

In general, I wanted to :

1) consume as much of the unknown dimension scraps as possible- this meant the working unit had to be pretty small as my scraps vary in size but tend toward small sizes..like cutoff 2x4 material etc.

I ended up settling on sticks about 1/2" square by atleast 3" long. At this size, most of my scraps could be used to
form at least 1 if not a lot more "sticks".

2) Don't make it overly complicated to end up with a working unit of some sort. Otherwise I'd get bored of making the building blocks which would
not help reduce the scrap pile. So I wanted to limit tool use to bandsaw and sanding disks.

3) Figure out something to make from the sticks. Well-with a simple building block, the skys the limit. As a first test product, I made some funky coasters.

You can see the progression from left to right.

1. bandsaw sticks and dimension with sanding disk.
2. glue sticks into a flat "board"
3. glue "boards" into block
4. bandsaw block to make coaster shape
Still gotta do some sanding and staining but I think this suffices for some simple XMAS gifts and slowly starts to reduce my scrap piles.

Sanding the sticks could be quite time consuming, and they are too small to send thru the planer without rigging up a carrier etc. So i made
a little jig to ride the fence which holds 6 sticks at once and gaps the sanding surface away from the fence and fingers...also made from scraps Shown in the pic is the conical sanding disk, which Id hoped would work well but didnt (not sure why) so in later trials Ive been using the flat sanding disk with more repeatable results.
b

Great idea .

I am curious how you expected the conical disc to work???

Hmm..well, with the sticks mounted on that jig...you'd slide along the fence sanding away 1 face of each stick.
Then, turn all the sticks 90 degrees and do again. finally, step the fence slightly closer and finish the other 2 faces.

Am i thinking about it wrong?

It is the absence of 6 sticks in the jig pic that has me confused.

I don't have a conical disc, but don't you have to tilt the table (about 4 degrees) when using it? The table appears "flat" in the picture, but maybe the angle at which the picture was taken is just making the table look "flat". Or, perhaps the table was returned to 90 degrees after you tried and gave up on the conical when you took the picture.

I did this a couple of years ago when my pile of scraps accumulated too much. I had multiple kinds of wood and no use for the small pieces.

Yes-thanks for the comments.

The images don't do the setup justice. With the conical disc you need to have the table tilted at 4 degrees to match the disk surface.
That was true during use, but i was already taking it apart when i got around to pics.

Heres some more info based on comments above.

Here's how the sticks are mounted onto the jig. The white backing is just some double sticky tape to hold things in place. Im thinking this is where the issue was- that when a "longer" stick came in contact with the sander first, it could be levered off the jig/tape surface and then as more contact is made it would push it flat onto the jig again.
Here is a closed up pic of how the sticks would pass by the conical disk. Again-i didn't tilt the table 4 degrees for the pic
Here is my new approach. I slotted an old 2x10 to hold the sticks and run a hand planer across them with a zero step setting until they are flush with the 1/2" slot. Plane/rotate/plane/rotate/plane/rotate etc until I end up with a 1/2 sq stick.

I like this approach a bit better, seems more consistent and a helluva lot less dust.

b

You can make all sorts of things from cutoffs with a scrollsaw.

I have a ton of walnut cutoffs but no idea what to do with them... I like the bowl idea. Give me an excuse to learn how to turn something on the lathe. This at least helps me get something dimensional. Thanks for posting bainin...