I'm sure that some of you out there can relate to the fact that it's sometimes hard to part with the scraps that your hobby produces. Whether it's a small piece of metal, fabric, wood or other material you work with, we often imagine that it could be used for some other project in the future.
There's likely many factors that contribute to this way of thinking:
- You spent hard-earned cash to buy it and you don't like wasting money
- You don't want to contribute to land fill or there's no easy way to recycle it
- You think about just how many resources it took to create the material in the first place and struggle with seeing it wasted
These are some of the thoughts that enter my mind when I'm holding that off cut and deciding whether it goes in the burn/compost pile or back on the shelf.
Over time, though, this practice of keeping more and more scraps will slowly clutter up your shop. That's what happened to us and it got to a point where we could no longer work efficiently.
The one dedicated spot to store plywood scraps slowly became a dumping ground for all sorts of stuff. So we started stacking sheets in front of and on top of other useful things. For us, that meant blocking access to our lumber wall and the CNC.
We essentially put our shop into a state of gridlock.
So this week, we set out to correct the problem. We built this lumber cart to store all of our sheet goods, as well as long, slender off cuts. The best part was that (with the exception of the casters) we built the whole thing out of the scraps we had in the shop! It was a total win!
As always, we fired up our SOLIDWORKS for Makers license and got to designing. At first, we imagined a cart that could do it all, with one side for plywood, long and short shelves for lumber, and a bin for storing short pieces vertically.
But then we remembered we wanted to separate partial plywood sheets from full sheets, so we created a revision and designed this. Where one side could store the partial sheets and still have a few small shelves and a bin for off cuts.
In the end, we realized that the small shelves weren't really adding any value and they were complicating the construction more than they needed to, so we landed on this design.
It's made up of 3 basic sections:
The base frame is made of 2x4s and reinforced with two plywood rails/skids along the bottom.
The 4 A-frames are made from strips of 3/4" plywood and they're glued and nailed together in a staggered way to form perfect half lap joints.
We built a quick jig out of more scraps to ensure all four of the frames came out identically.
While making these, we were amazed at just how efficient this way of building is. You need very few long pieces, so you can easily find a bunch of short scraps around the shop that might otherwise be difficult to use.
...and the resulting structures are lightweight and incredibly strong!
The shelves and rails are made of more plywood scraps. They're just a series of narrow strips that create smooth surfaces for your material to rest against.
We used 1/4" plywood for the shelves inside the A-frames, because the real strength of the shelves come from the A-frame cross ties.
To support the full and partial sheets that will live on the outside of the A-frames, we used thicker, 3/4" pieces. At the bottom, we cut wedges to tilt the floor back 10 degrees and maintain a 90 degree corner where it meets the uprights.
We notched the cross slats so they'd trap the A-frames once installed. This helped us maintain perfect spacing of the A-frames all the way up their full height and more importantly, added a lot of strength to the build, especially in terms of racking.
One small detail we added was this gap in the floor on the side where we'll keep full sheets. It lets me get my hand under the center of mass of a sheet and easily lift it (with my legs, not my back 😉).
The build came out great, and our shop is much more tidy! We can access our lumber wall and CNC again, and are excited to put this cart to good use.
Be sure to check out this video to see how the whole project came together:
Feel free to download the design in native SOLIDWORKS as well as STEP formats:
We've also prepared this PDF that might help those who want to build one of these for themselves. It's not a full step-by-step set of instructions, but should have enough info to get you well on your way to making one. Just click the arrow in the upper right hand corner to download the PDF.
