Off cuts and scraps, what do YOU do with them?

I’ve made block sets for the neighbor kids to play with
There’s usually enough odd shapes you can get out of scraps. They probably are the only kids in the neighborhood with Cherry and walnut cubes in the sofa cushions..

With som ingenuity you can also cobble up things like marble rolls.

You can make a sled for a table saw and cut into small squares and glue them up into a great end grain cutting board. I know a studio furniture maker in North Carolina who makes only about six pieces of bespoke furniture a year. His wife developed a series of earrings made of polished pieces. Combined, her income exceeds his in a year. It makes his furniture making business more than twice as profitable. personally I use my hard wood scraps for cutting boards, inlays, and walking canes.

To bolster my dropping confidence when projects go wrong, I make quick and simple things that work.

This holder for a 3-connector wall socket extension lead, I made by planing an off-cut to the bevel of the connector, crosscutting it into four pieces, and gluing them pairwise. The holder sits on the apron/rail under the top of my workbench.

I wanted to have a go at bent laminations…

Many thanks for this thread, Colin. I really like it. So here’s another one

There’s a thin line between a real mess at the workbench and a constructive chaos.

The timber yard is very generous with giving away form plywood in small sizes for free. I used one piece to make a jig for chiselling and planing long dovetails (rebates bevelled at 1:4); hoping that when these drawer runners were pressed into their sockets (housings/dadoes), they would align square and true with the rails of the drawer dividers. That they did, and as an additional benefit a real problem was solved. Bad cupping in the drawer sides was flattened out with these sliding dovetail drawer runners acting as crossbars.

Serendipity works again.

No, no taper. With the sockets well away from the edges of the sides, I didn’t think there would much of a risk that they would break, even if a part of a tail was pushing very much upwards and to the side. I did give the tails a little tiny “run-in”. When tapering, I follow Mr. Tom Fidgen’s recommendation: “Just take off a minute fraction on the tails, without any tapering of the sockets”. In all honesty, my talent for getting this joint loose, does not need the addition of tapering.

There were several moments when setting up the table saw appeared as a most palatable alternative, but eventually I got the hang on how to cut. I began with a chisel that was resting on a piece of thick paper. That way I could pare off close to the line without undercutting. After that I alternated between a shoulder plane and the chisel, with very frequent tests of the fit.

Next step is to make a 1:4 dovetail plane. Putting a bevelled fence on the rebate plane resulted in the open mouth of the plane tilting over the edge of the rebate, with some ugly tear outs.