Hello everyone I have been in woodworking for like 20 years and one of my bigger issues has always been what size pieces you keep and what you throw away.
I’m really scared because now there’s no pieces I wanna throw away ever with my new CNC!!
Does anyone have a good way of storing all the different small pieces?
If you can glue it up, glue it up. If you cannot glue it up, it is firewood.
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This is an age old problem. You want to keep everything. The best idea I have is dependent on your space. At some point if your storage space is over flowing and it becomes dangerous then throw away the small stuff. You can make small stuff out of bigger pieces. As @cheu suggested I have joined small long strips with a finger joint bit but that is labor intensive.
The hoarding gene is in all of us. But at some point if you have not used a scrap in 5 years it is not likely to ever use it. However you can make a bin system to put small pieces in or as I do I buy the regular Bankers Boxes. The reason I use the Bankers Boxes is they are small enough not to overload them but strong enough to handle the wood pieces. You can mark the boxes and they stack well and do not get smashed in on the bottom layer.
Just get realistic and realize we cannot keep everything. One other piece of advise is there is more at the store. Wood prices have soared over the past years but keeping pieces you will likely never use is false economy. The pieces are making a mess, making a safety issue and their value is not as much as you think it is. So just let go and take an ax to the stock pile and get rid of a lot of it. You will feel better after you have. Now one alternative to that is to sort out the small pieces but store them somewhere else for a while and then eventually dispose of them. It is a stepped procedure that may make it easier to let go.
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The best advice I ever got on this is to standardize on stock sizes — anything which doesn’t match a stock size either gets stored with the next size down, or cut down to match.
Consider making the smallest size something rather small and suited to gluing together to make cutting boards or some similar project (say squares of the average stock thickness you work with) if you’re inclined to work thus.
This of course depends on your having the tools/wherewithal to easily cut stuff.
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I always thought (I can use this for something some day). most of the time you will save these things for years and think of all the time it has been sitting there being stored. How many times you moved it. And the actual amount you actually did use. I finally decided that most of it was better off as fire fuel. If it is not a hard wood toss it out. For what you do to save a few bucks you can have more shop room and a really nice fire.
Anthony
First off I’m really glad to know that I’m not the only one struggling with that!
Because I ran a cabinet shop for so long. I have tons of hardwood pieces that’s what’s making it so hard to toss them. And on top of that they’re the cool wiggly little and they were hard to use on regular tools which I’m guessing are a little easier with the CNC machine as it doesn’t use a reference edge to move the wood.
I will certainly look into the boxes and re-read this article a few times before I decide what I should do for my shop.
As always, thank you CNC team!
If you’ve got a lot, might want to consider how many USPS flat rate boxes you can fill with them — at the right price, and a suitable description they’ll probably move.
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The CNC certainly has me using pieces that I considered scrap before. There wasn’t much I could do with a 1/4” thick piece or a 2” thick piece that was 5” square.
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I have the same issue, so I decided to put all the scraps in a bucket and let my wife put them in the fireplace. This alleviates me have to make the decision and my wife feels like she is getting away with something with burning my stuff. Its a Win-Win 
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Loool 
I like that plan!
I built a 16’ lumber shed to hold my stock and dedicated the last 4’ of it for offcuts.
The access to the offcuts is through a door on the short side of the shed…I measure and mark each piece with a length and species. Anything from 6" to 4’ goes in there.
- Gary
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