What to do with Formica scraps?

A visitor to CNCROi.com asked me the other day what to do with Formica scraps, well, depending on your machinery, there is quite a bit that can be done to minimize what goes out in the bin.

If you aren’t familiar with Formica, it’s a laminate brand name that is used for everything from countertops by the millworking industry to endless interior design options for the design one. It’s an incredibly resilient material available in endless surfaces from steel to mirror, solid to patterned. Most likely, your business has some formica somewhere in your building and you aren’t even aware of it!

For us here in the shop, any scraps from projects – unless the client wants them back – are used to create samples to greatly minimize what gets thrown out in the trash. I’ve been so busy building-up CNCROi.com over the past few months that I’ve allowed our scraps to start to build-up but we will be doing mailouts shortly to specific companies showcasing our capabilities and giving them some stuff to stick in their own showroom or for their sales people to have on-hand.

What to do with Formica scraps?

Here is a list of things you can use formica for if you have a CNC laser… if not, contact us and we can make these for you!

• Business cards… most of our scraps are small and the form factor for CNC laser cutting and engraving formica are perfect.
• Jigs… yep, JIGS! We are given projects by manufacturers and sometimes their widgets are incredibly thin, like annealing a couple hundred steel plates that are about 1 mm thick, instead of using plywood which we then have to try to pull out the widgets, formica is a great way to get the placement perfect for easy take-out and put in applications.
• “Art”, if you have a bunch of off-cuts, why not just use them to make some wall art to stick in the office, home or shop? With the precision of our laser, we can re-cut random collages of formica into specific shapes, put a matching border out of laser cut wood or acrylic and voila… conversation piece!
• Countertop coasters! The nice thing about formica is that it doesn’t get wet, if a piece is big enough, we’ll just cut it out to be a custom coaster and use it until we lose it.
• Dividers and separators, whether we are glueing models together or need to layer projects in specific increments to keep track of them, the durability and easy cleaning ability of Formica makes it great for these purposes.
• Ninja throwing stars… unlike paper or cardboard, ninja throwing stars made out of formica fly incredibly well and don’t generally break on contact – of course, wear your safety glasses as they also tend to be sharp unless we cut them with rounded edges.

I hope this helps to give you some ideas of what to do with formica scraps… like I mentioned in previous blog posts, your imagination is the only limit you’ll have in the shop and in life, expand it to your own benefit.