As I’m sure we know have found out by now that a lot of cutting leads to a lot of scrap material laying around. And even though I try to compact my design when I cut, there always seem to be space leftover.
So I was trying to think of things to make with those scraps and came up with keychains. I have a craft show coming up and thought I could get a decent amount of these made from all my left overs.
Alignment can be tricky with these but what I did was use my cut lines to check that alignment before running on the real cut settings. Running a cut at power of 1 and speed at 500 will allow you to see a faint line (on masking tape of course).
Anyone else have things they’ve have using their scraps?
Great use of scraps! I’ve got tons of Swiss cheese plywood here to do something similar. I did make some tiny fiddles and guitars for our local fiddlers group but they will never need them all.
I can’t leave any surface untouched and I hate to throw material away no matter how small. I fill everything with whatever little doodad is sitting in my files. My house is covered with little lasered scraps so now I take a few with me to gatherings. Inevitably the GF laser comes up in conversation and I give them away. Now that I’ve been cutting for a bit, I am able to let some small scraps go. It’s still painful though.
Here’s a pile of finished keychains I just completed. My last cut I just added a bunch of things in the spaces where I knew I wouldn’t be able to fit future projects… these little keychains are perfect for that. I also have some bigger ones that I made into magnets.
Buttons
This wasn’t the fanciest design since I was in a time crunch and interested in obtaining functioning pants quickly, but it seemed to be an ok use for scrap material and took less than a minute to design and cut. I’ll proably circle back for more complicated buttons later with scrap pieces.
I too tend to waste a ton of good material simply because I didn’t plan ahead. I now have a file with about 20 designs ready to throw on a glowforge job to prevent the waste. Somehow, I always steer back towards star wars stuff.
Here is a bunch of crap made on some leftover maple.
Hey ya’ll, I know this is an old post, but does anyone know the settings used for these cool skull buttons? I don’t have white acrylic on hand so its hard to compare, but I have tried many other acrylics and even wood but the detail doesn’t seem to come out well on any of them so I’m wondering if it’s a settings thing. Thanks to any help!
