We’ve cut more than a thousand large sheets of steel on our CNC plasma cutter since we got it about five years ago. That is a whole lot of steel! Cutting that many sheets of steel produces a whole lot of off-cuts as well. We do our best to nest our pieces as tight as possible to minimize waste. The off-cuts which are of a usable size are kept for cutting smaller pieces. The balance is put in a pile and then sent to the scrap yard for recycling. Even though we use the smallest piece possible when cutting, the off-cuts do pile up in a hurry and storing them in such a way that we could easily find the right size piece quickly became a formidable challenge. We built two vertical storage racks but the slots we fabricated proved to be too wide and too few. After a while it became almost impossible to sort through the rack and pull out the perfect piece without a struggle. In the last day Matt emptied the biggest rack and added more dividers. He is now working on sorting out tons of steel scraps by size and thickness, after trimming off unusable corners and tabs. It is a big job but when he’s done it will make our metal cutting chores more efficient.
