I keep a scrap bin of cut-offs and I've used it twice in 12 years
There's a galvanized tub under the bench at the shop, full of steel drops. Anything under about six inches goes in. Some of it is 4140 from a piece I did for a hospital in '09. Some of it is trash and I know it's trash.
I've pulled from that bin twice. Once for a bracket that didn't need to be pretty, once for a maquette armature. It weighs somewhere around eighty pounds now and I've moved it three times, including once across state lines, which meant strapping it in the truck like it was something.
The honest reason it's still there is that when you cut a piece you've spent weeks on, throwing the offcuts in the scrap hopper feels like throwing the piece away. So I keep a tub instead. It's not practical. It's a superstition with a lid on it.
That's mine. Somebody tell me theirs isn't weirder.
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I have the same bin, except mine is two olive crates of smalti and stone offcuts, and I also know exactly how much of it is garbage. I've stopped pretending it's material. It's not material, it's a record. The 4140 from the hospital piece is the same thing as my slivers from a floor I laid in 2011. You can't throw out proof that the work happened.
Twice in twelve years is honest, by the way. Most people who keep a bin like that secretly never touch it and just move it around the country.
"it's a record" is right and I think that's why the bin gets heavier than it should. the smalti though. two crates of it. does it stay sorted or is it a soup by now, because mine's a soup