George Vondriska

How to Save Your Wood Shavings

George Vondriska
Duration:   3  mins

Description

Most of the time, woodworkers are looking for ways to get rid of the shavings and sawdust from their projects. But every once in a while, when there’s something special about the shavings, you may want to collect and save the sawdust. Here’s a great trick that makes it super simple to grab that cool sawdust.

Why bother saving sawdust?

Admittedly, if the sawdust you just got done making is a commodity item (standard stuff from oak, pine, maple) there’s probably no compelling reason to hold onto it. But here’s an example of when you might want to. On a recent project George put a piece of brass round stock on his lathe and turned it into a wine bottle stopper. It was a cool project, and resulted in brass shavings and curls laying all over his lathe. It would have been a shame to just sweep all those cool looking shavings into a trash barrel, and not find some other use for them. Instead, George used a cool trick to vacuum the shavings up, but keep them isolated from other junk that was already in his shop vacuum.

Then what?

The brass ended up in a silicone mold with casting resin poured over it. Once the resin was cured George had a new turning blank. This is a cool way to give shavings a second life. Casting resin is only one solution for this. There are lots of easy ways to upcycle sawdust.

But wait, there’s more!

This is one solution to the problem of isolating cool sawdust and shavings in your shop. There are bound to be lots more ways to do this. A cool thing about woodworking is the variety of ways to get things done. This is why we keep producing more shop tips.

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4 Responses to “How to Save Your Wood Shavings”

  1. Jürgen Stoll

    Sawdust from beech is perfect for smoking salmon...

  2. Ken

    Thanks George, Now, just how cool is that???

  3. jarethhsms

    Quick question: did you turn the brass on your wood lathe? If so what kind of tools did you use?

  4. Gerard

    Great idea. As for wood shavings, I use them as traction aide on my driveway when there is ice. Come spring, I sweep them up and add them to the compost pile.

As woodworkers, we're so prone to grabbing every stick of scrap in our shop and holding onto it, just in case we need it someday. And that's not really me, I'm not that guy, cause I don't want that little wood pile clogging up my shop. However, when it comes to something like this, I am gonna save this. So something like this, I just turned a brass piece on my lathe, and as a result I have all these brass shavings. And I'm pretty sure I can come up with something cool to do with brass shavings, those I do wanna save.

So, I'll show you a great way that you can collect this stuff to make sure that you can hold onto it. Now, the big curls like this, those are easy, because I can just grab them. But all these little shavings, yeah, they're more of a challenge. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna use a vacuum, but the key to this is a little bit of filtration.

Have a piece of a rag, and that's gonna go over the hose here. And make yourself a little recess, the best part of school. And then capture that with a nozzle. And then, clean up your lathe. Now, hear the vacuum, you can hear it working harder.

You can hear it working harder, that's cause we're filling up that filter. It's like a little bag of gold. I mean it's brass, boy is that heavy. Now we take that, and dump this into here. Part of the key to this, I know I'm gonna do this.

So, before I work on that machine, whether it's the lathe, or I'm about to cut brass or aluminum on my on my CNC machine, I go through with the vacuum, no filter, and I clean everything off. So, when I get to this stage, I end up with really nothing but brass or aluminum, or whatever the cool product is piled up here. Now, what are we gonna do with that? You can get molds like this on Amazon that's made out of silicon, molds for casting resin. So, what I did is from a previous project, I took all of that stuff, put it in the mold, and poured casting resin over it.

And now I have another turning blank, that looks amazing and I can't wait to work with it. And we can take advantage of having the bi-product from this, to do this, to make into something else. So, that little filter in your vacuum is a great way to capture the shavings and make sure you can use them again later.

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