Larry has been a cabinetmaker for 40 years. He has never thrown away a piece of wood that had any useful dimension. The scrap management system in his shop is, arguably, as sophisticated as any other system in it – a color-coded bin system organized by species and dimension, supplemented by a wall rack of short offcuts sorted by thickness, and a dedicated lumber salvage cabinet where boards too small for cabinetwork but too interesting to discard wait for the project that will use them.
The philosophy comes from his apprenticeship with a master cabinetmaker in the 1980s who maintained that “a short piece of cherry is not scrap – it’s a drawer front that hasn’t found its cabinet yet.” Larry has lived by this principle for four decades. His shop contains, at any given time, approximately 2,000 board feet of hardwood in lengths from 6 inches to 14 feet, spanning 18 species, organized in a system that allows him to identify and retrieve any piece in under three minutes.
The storage system occupies one full wall of his 40×60 shop: a cantilever rack system with arms at 24-inch spacing, each arm labeled with the species and approximate board-foot count of what it holds. Short pieces under 12 inches live in a bin system below the rack, sorted by species and thickness. “Interesting” pieces – boards with character (figured grain, burl inclusions, dramatic color) – live in a separate display rack where Larry can see them daily and think about what they want to become.
He uses scraps constantly. Every drawer bottom, every jig, every sample piece, every mock-up comes from the scrap system before any new lumber is purchased. “I haven’t bought a piece of wood under 12 inches in thirty years,” he says. “I have thirty years of 12-inch pieces.” And in most of them, he knows exactly when they arrived and what project they came from. What’s your relationship with shop scraps? Compulsive keeper, disciplined editor, or somewhere in between? Tell us your scrap philosophy below.