Every Scrap is Sacred

Every Scrap is good. If a scrap is wasted, God gets quite irate. I struggle with my wood problem. I have a lot of it and tend to hang on to even more of it. Recently I bundled up about 100 lbs of off cuts and shipped them off to some friends. I don’t really make much smaller stuff anymore so I resolved to only keep furniture sized pieces. Even then unless it is a highly figured piece I’m hesitant to hold on to it because it can be difficult to color match a piece when you build it with nothing but scraps from other projects. So still with as much wood as I have, I’m doing my best to get rid of the other stuff before it drowns me. I feel good about this move and have no regrets about the lumber I have shipped off to needy woodworkers.

Until yesterday…

I was gluing up a splay legged table and needed some angled clamping blocks. I just turned a few bowls this weekend for a customer out of some Cypress they supplied. I had cut out some punky, rotten sections that were really ugly before mounting the blanks. So I dug through the trash, pulled out these little blocks and pared an angle into one face that matched by table splay angle. A little double stick tape later and I had my table clamped up and gluing.

If trash wood like this has a use in my shop how will I ever justify getting rid of the other stuff?! Somebody call “Hoarders”, I’ll soon be ready for my closeup.