Scrap Wood Bin

While I have been lucky enough to spend a decent amount of time in my workshop recently, I feel strongly that the majority of my “workshop” time over the past year has been spent thinking about my workshop. I have a couple notebooks (I’d only have one, but I always lose something if I only have one of it. Just ask all my half-full coffee cups) in which I’m usually trying to sketch up how I want my space to look. I could move a cabinet over here. I could move those clamps over there. Do I have enough space for a band saw? Rinse, repeat.

I think (hope?) I’ll be able to look back in a few years and say this stage of the evolution of my shop was all about defining the workflow and layout. while much of my time has been spent on rearranging the space, the fun bits have been spent making things to help me rearrange the space. When I’m doing it right, thoughts like “Damn, I need to find a place to put all these offcuts” can turn into “well, I suppose I should design and build a storage rack for my offcuts.” — And in this case, that’s actually what happened!

One of my biggest personal DIY-project annoyances is that I never remember to take “before” pictures. I always take the “after” shots, and I’m getting much better at taking more progress photos, but man I suck at documenting the problem I’m trying to solve before just jumping into it. Whatever! You have undiagnosed ADHD!

As with so many of my woodworking projects — at least, as I advance a bit in the hobby — the design of this thing took me longer to do than the entire process of making it. I swear, I stared at my notebook for hours, over the course of a few weeks, just trying to get the shape out onto the page. As with all of the cabinetry-related projects I’ve done for the shop so far (workbenches, planer stand, etc.) I’ve become mildly obsessed with ensuring there are no visible plywood edges once I’m done. My dad would say (and has, on numerous occasions) that I’m over-designing my shop furniture — but I’m having fun with it, and I feel like setting these kinds of challenges for myself helps me advance my skills more than it would otherwise. At least that’s what I tell myself while I’m staring blankly at my notebook, wondering whether or not I’ve just added 3/8" too much to that board or not.

With that said, here’s what I eventually came up with. Here’s a view of it just after I finished it (“finished” in the woodworking sense — I just put my final coat of finish on the wood. Homemade “danish oil” in this case):

You can see the most obviously unique thing about the bin here: the two-inch gap I left on the bottom. And let me tell you — that’s a heck of a lot more work than it would’ve been to just do a full solid bottom.

“But why?” I hear you asking. Well, in a shop, sawdust frequently makes its way onto and into just about everything. I have a very good dust collection setup, and a secondary air filter to collect the vast majority of dust, but it still gets into things. So this little gap makes it easy for me to blow out anything that falls into the bottom. That, and it helps me get to small pieces that may have fallen down there underneath anything larger. That’s the theory, anyway.

I’ll leave with a shot of where it actually lives now — on the back of my planer stand. I’m frankly shocked at how well it did what I thought it might do when I thought it up.

I’m really excited that I finally got this thing out of my brain and into existence. It was a fun challenge, and helped me get rid of some scrap wood (by using it to build the thing), and move just about all my other smaller pieces off my table saw (I mean, until I inevitably fill it up with more crap). And now that I have some space to think (and a very full bin of potentially useful wood offcuts), maybe I can knock out another quick project or two.

—Greg