Welcome to Summer 2022! I’d like to invite you to another instalment of the Scrap Challenge. We’ve done a few before, sometimes focused on specific scrap, sometimes not, but always a hoot.
I invite you to give it a shot. All you need to do is find some material that has a very high chance of not being used, and give it new life. This can be a broken down toy, a few scrap pieces of wood, an odd scrap of metal, some fabric nobody would use in their right mind, etc. Take that material and make it into something awesome.
Once you’ve done that, post photos of the material and end result either here, or in a separate thread if you want to do a larger write up (then link it here so we know it is your submission).
Beyond that, there’s not a lot of rules.
When August 31st comes around, we will vote and a very small-value prize will be awarded to the winner, along with bragging rights.
Ultimately, this is your limited colour palette to work with that I hope inspires your creativity and diverts some material away from landfills.
The challenge is open for anyone (member or not) and I encourage mediums and materials from wood, metal, fabric, plastic, electrons, and beyond.
I hope to see some unique items, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
I made a thin-rip guide to use with the table saw. It is made entirely out of materials found at the hackspace.
What is a thin rip guide, you ask? It is used to cut thin strips of wood, safely and repeatably. The main use case I have is for cutting splines for picture frames or boxes. It could also be used to cut shims to an exact thickness, or edge banding.
This works as a guide and reference point on the left side of the blade, so once you set the width of the off cut you want, you just adjust the fence after each cut so that the work piece touches the guide bearing on the left and the fence on the right. Keeping the off cut on the left side of the blade greatly reduces the chance of a kickback when cutting really thin strips.
I managed to cut two test strips before the noise bylaw kicked in. The strips were about 0.050" thick, +/- about 0.005".
It allows you to use a draw knife to quickly carve freeform items, like spoons and other things. You sit on it and push the foot pedals to clamp onto your piece. Release pressure on your feet and it’ll let up clamping pressure so you can adjust the piece.
It is made of almost 100% scrap. The only new pieces on it are about half the screws. (The other half of the screws were salvaged).
The wood is all scrap, every stick. Some have been scrap 2-3 times over.
At some point, the wood in this has been one or more of the following:
A pallet for our heat treating oven
A bed headboard
House studs
Cement slab form
Sanding block
Something that came with my house shoved behind a shed and kinda rotting away.
Scrap from a birdhouse
Scrap from a shelf
The pivot was made from an offcut of PVC conduit.
Who knows how long I’ll keep it or if I’ll improve it, but it was fun and I’ll have some fun with it. Not pretty but at least I can do something I couldn’t do before.
