dumpster diving anyone?

I have been known to stop when I see someone cutting down a tree with character. The looks I get loading freshly cut wood, while wearing a custom made suit, into the trunk of my BMW are priceless.

-- My favorite piece is my last one, my best piece is my next one.

I find a lot of things from yard sales. Sometimes I’ll barter down an old dinged up end table or something, and walk away with it for two bucks, and get 8sq feet of walnut out of it or something. The wood looks great after I mill it. You’ll find the best deals when your local small towns have “Yard sale day.” On the last day, what’s left is perceived to be junk. I’ll go out and look for the solid wood furniture, and take home what expensive hardwoods I can mill, and they’ll just about give it to you. The rest goes in the shop’s wood stove for heat.

You might also check your local sawmills that kiln dry lumber. They sometimes have cutoffs that they throw away or burn. I also am not afraid to ask the workers at Lowe’s or Home Depot if they have lumber that is damaged. Sometimes, you can walk away with a 1/2 sheet of 3/4 birch ply for $4 to $5. Home Depot almost always has a cart with damaged lumber in it that they are trying to move. I don’t see any problem with trying to negotiate its price.

If you pay attention to the stores in your area that remodel, you may be able to acquire some of that before it even makes it to the back of the store. There was a grocery store that I used to work at as a teenager that remodeled some years back. I just walked in to buy groceries and was talking to the manager (who is a friend of mine). I walked out of that place with about 15 sheets of good pegboard.

Contractors are typically pretty wasteful. If you contact them on a job site or get permission from the company, usually they throw away more $$ daily than I would spend on a project. And it’s all new material. It’s really a shame to just let it go to a landfill.

Any material that I think has been compromised with some sort of garbage waste, I forget. You just can’t risk stuff like that if you don’t know where it’s been. But I’m hard pressed to pass up a decent deal when I know the material is clean and usable.

I hope that gives you some ideas.

Steve

-- As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17) †

I keep an eye out for construction sites near home and I will as the crew if I can dig thru thier burn/discard pile. I have gotten some great finds from them.

-- Adrian ..... The 11th Commandment...."Thou Shalt Not Buy A Wobble Dado"

Just be observant. Look for someone moving out. And in business dumpsters. When people have no idea what to do with something, into the trash it goes.

I work at a car dealership. The line-a-beds come stacked together with some crappy looking boards between them. One day someone cleaned up that area and tossed mountains of what looked like fir 2×2s into the sumpster. I asked one of the managers if I could salvage them, and he said, “Sure. What are you going to use them for?”
“I dunno, but wood is expensive. Even if I just chop it up for campfire wood, that’s a big savings.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I paid like seven bucks for three chunks of firewood last time we went camping.”

When I started loading, I saw that they were fir and hemlock 2×4s that had been ripped rather haphazardly. Still, I used a couple as tomato stakes. They also make nice set-up pieces for the saw. Backing pieces on the drill press. Elevate wood while finishing – Who cares what gets on them? Most of the pile was stacked tightly on the garage floor on top of a couple stringers then cut into 14” lengths with a circular saw. They fit just right into some empty boxes I had, and came with us on a camping trip. You can’t gather wood in National Park campgrounds, and I sure wasn’t going to pay mini-mart prices for wood that wasn’t much better than what I had!

Good tip Adrian.
- JJ

-- JJ...... I guess you could say I'm a 54 year old "juniorjock". — Make things with wood.

I was able to score all the slat board from a Linen’s & Things when it was going out of business. They were gutting the interior of the store and I asked what they were going to do with it and was told it was going to the dumpster. I took as many 4×4 sheets as I could load up on my pickup and trailer. Shared with several other local woodworkers.

-- Those that say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Jeff, I keep my eyes open, but I just can’t seem to get a good “find” like that. Guess I’m not in the right place at the right time.
-JJ

-- JJ...... I guess you could say I'm a 54 year old "juniorjock". — Make things with wood.

Also ask at lowes and home depot. I used to work at lowes and got a whole pile of 5/4 oak boards that were dunnage materials. they usually stack it out back or throw it in the dumpster, sometimes they will even let you have it for free.

-- I came, I sawed I fixed it. (well sort of)

I had a friend call me up once wanting to know if I wanted some 1/2”x4×8 OSB sheets. I said how many and how much? The answer was 30 sheets and free! It used to come on rail cars as dividers for something and he was running out of places to put it. Didn’t take me long to go get it I can tell you.

-- Just remember,it was a lone amatuer that built the ark, and a team of experts built the Titanic.

How many times have I stopped along the highway and picked up the scraps of wood that some piece of furiture made as it fell off some truck going down the road!

-- Never board, always knotty, lots of growth rings

I found a great source a couple of year ago. I saw an add in a magazine for pallet loads of “Hardwood Scraps”, about 150 BF per pallet for 50 dollars. I responded to it, to find out it was a business that imports hardwood flooring from all over the world, then they take the bare flooring and put their special finish on it, box it up and distribute it. The flooring comes in crates that are made of the same material as the flooring.

When I showed up to buy some one day, the guy working there had no idea about the add, but said I was welcome to take whatever I wanted from their “trash “pile. Their trash pile was one whole side of their shipping and receiving lot. I went their every Saturday for 2 months and took home 2 entire truck loads of awesome wood.

That was about 5 years ago, and I still have a pile of lumber about 4’ wide x 3’ high by 7’ long. Most of the wood was from South America, I could tell because the sides of the crates were marked with lots of shipping info, including the country of origin, which a lot of was Brazil. I don’t have all of the species nailed down, but I did recognize some: Lots of different types of Mahogany because they carry Mahogany 5/4×6 deck boards also, purple heart, Ipe, several I can’t identify and lots and lots of Brazillian Cherry….even a bit of Bird’s Eye Maple from Canada.

Most boards were either 3/4” or 1” thick and any where from 4 to 8 inches wide and 4 to 8 ft long. I did have to pull a lot of nails though. I even got a decent bit of turning stock from the cross planks that the 1x was nailed to, they were usually 2” x 2”, so I have a lot of chisels and gouges with nice Mahogany and Brazillian Cherry handles!

If you get a chance to check em out the company was Lumber Liquidators. I don’t know if they still allow it or not, it has been several years since I have been there. If you go, take along a good pair of leather gloves, a claw hammer, nail puller, crow bar and I even took my cordless drill and circular saw. OH…and take a friend to help…it is a lot of work!!!

Good Luck,
Steve

PS: It killed me to meet other guys out there getting this stuff for “free firewood”.

Dan,

I have found the majority of my tools at Boeing Surplus. It is a shame but a little over a year ago boeing shut down their retail store You could find everything from machine tools, saws, drills, and just about anything you could imagine.

I buy a lot of tools from ebay and I also find a lot from craigslist. I am a master scrapper. I have 3 cncs 2 panel saws, 2 radial arm saws, 4 drill presses, a band saw, and a big pin router…..........all bought of of ebay and craigslist. I own a shop so I need and use all the tools.

Cheers,

Ben

My sources have been local, and though not free, they have been frugal. i beach combed for usable wood for awhile, a bad choice because of the sand and salt embedded, but doing so led me to talk to alot of people about it, and an acquaintance told me he had some maple trees i could have if i could take them down.
well the trees ended up being bigger than i could have imagined, three of them were greater than 6 foot diameter. but even with hiring a faller and a portable mill to handle them, I have custom maple lumber that only cost about 80 cents per board foot.
because i had such an enormous amount of wood, I had to sell what was more than i could store. I sold the burls first(i had about 2 truckloads) and the thinner stock as it dried the fastest. this alone recouped my costs of the entire operation. and i found suitable storage for a hundred or so 3×12 plank at my wifes work(for free).
This was a long process , and through alot of conversations about it with the faller and the portable mill guy, i ended up with a contact that turned out to be the best. a smaller private mill about 3 hours away. the guy there is great, he sells me local rare woods for a fifth of the price i would pay near home. and keeps specific wood i ask for till the next time i drop by. since i go visit friends near the mill twice a year, i always bring home a truckload, and it has never cost me more than 300 dollars for a half ton full.

as for tools, i started with box store stuff, but was quickly taken aside by more experienced woodworking neighbors. just knowing them as a group was like having my own private guild, and all were willing to help, and had tools they were willing to sell or give or lend. One of these good friends passed away a few months later, and his wife tried to give me everything(the man had 5 workbenches). this gave my woodworking a huge boost.
I have now since replaced alot of these older tools, ( but i have passed them all on to other aspiring woodworkers). so get to know other locals at the craft, they are your biggest resource.

-- Junior -Quality is never an accident-it is the reward for the effort involved.

I like Junior Joiner’s idea . . . befriend old codger woodworkers with nice tools and wait until they croak.

Actually, I did that years ago. Some of my metal-working tools were obtained that way. Now I’m becoming one of those old codgers and I’m keeping an eye out when I’m around one of you young snots. I never drink my coffee after one of you has been around. I get a fresh cup. : )

Rufus

-- Always remember half of the people in this country are below average.

LMAO

-- Junior -Quality is never an accident-it is the reward for the effort involved.

Now that I’m into woodworking, it makes me sick to think of what I passed up last summer. There was an antique furniture repair/sales place that had a large dumpster just FULL of discarded items when they moved. There was some broken furniture, tons of scraps, and other “interesting” finds. At the time I didn’t have any tools or a real zippy way to transport anything. Now I’m kicking myself quite hard! :-)

But I’ve learned the virtues of everything “following” me home. My garage recently was purged of some stuff—I’ve had a 1950’s era derelict Craftsman saw that someone robbed goodies off. I was going to use it for a welding table, and most recently for a router table, but last night someone else had a new toy and I had empty garage space. (And with another old “toy” saw – I was $50 richer to boot!) Now I have enough room for Shopsmith #2, and at this rate I’m reclaiming the purchase price of the 2nd one. ;-) Life is good!

-- Bradley Miller, Blue Springs, MO - http://myoldgarage.blogspot.com