So I’ve got a lot of scrap plywood lying around, of all different shapes and sizes, so I wanted to put it to some use. I thought that a good starting point might be making some small boxes of the plywood. That seemed straightforward enough, but I decided to practice a few new skills along the way – including using the mitre gauge rather than the rail on the table saw. This works pretty well for thin pieces of wood, but is less successful for longer pieces of wood.
Based on the scraps I had, I made boxes with the following dimensions:
Height: 95mm
Width: 90mm
Depth: 200mm
The challenge here was squaring off the scrap bits of plywood, which I did with the aid of the set squares and the plywood cabinets. The final results were not terrible – although there were some differences in size in the end.
However, once I’d built six of these little boxes, I decided I wanted a cabinet to host them in. Again, using some pine, I built a basic frame to fit the boxes (3 across, 2 levels). Then I used my router to cut a slot into the middle of the vertical pieces and built a frame for the shelves out of more scrap plywood. The slot needed to be about 7mm wide to fit the 7mm plywood – and my router bits were 6mm, so I had to do a few passes (as well as a few passes in depth, too) but it worked pretty well. I also used my table saw to cut the slots into the plywood frame so that the vertical and horizontal pieces fit snugly together.
