Came in this morning (12/23) to knock out a few quick things, and see there is thick purple insulation foam all over in the scrap area. The vast majority of the material is nowhere suitable for re-use by others.
I cleaned up what I could, but whoever left it behind needs to be more conscientious in the future.
There has also been a lot of 1/8ā hardboard piling up against the laser āfreeā table. Stuff with no usable material left. Lots of circles cut out. Here is when I took them to the trash. More have shown up since.
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Thereās been some great ones recently. Weāre pretty much done with the Christmas rush so we have a while now to think about signage or otherwise to convince people that the scrap pile isnāt an indoor dumpster.
Steph spoke with them about breaking material down. 
Two suggestions -
(a) Letās not call it the scrap pile. Thatās the wrong message. Letās call it the Re-use pile.
(b) At one time the signage indicated the minimum amount of usable material in order for it to be considered re-usable. It might be worth adding that to the signage.
That seems so obvious in retrospect. I like it.
At the last laser meeting we did approve a scrap rule that all pieces much have an 8"x8" useable area, or fit in a āsample cutsā bin we planned to provide. I just need to actually make the sign and post it up.
can I help?
Absolutely! Technically weāve just got the one area under the table by the back door, but I donāt think anyone will complain about a sign on the scrap re-use pile by metal shop either, since itās mostly laser that clogs it up anyways.
Iāll bring a bin up tonight for test cut material. The intention is a few pieces each of common materials so people can test settings before ruining their own.
Iām envisioning something similar to the āYou must be THIS TALL to ride this rideā.
Can we also invest in some sort of crunching device - like a tree lopper - that can be handy to remove the surrounding āairā from a useable piece of left-over.
Most materials I see in the pile can be snapped apart by hand, were you thinking of an actual set of loppers?
And yeah! My thought was a card cabled to the area with a window in it, if you canāt fill up the window, throw it away.
well, yeah, I was thinking something an actual whacking device chained to the table. While theoretically, the stuff can be snapped apart, if itās not easy, they wonāt even try.
Pruning shears work great on light stock.
We can chain some of these down: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Wiss-9-3-4-in-MetalMaster-Compound-Action-Straight-Left-and-Right-Cut-Snips-M3RS/100060795
The only larger things that come to mind (like a throatless shear) are really, inexplicably good at removing fingers.
Thereās a pair of shears wire roped to the rear table and a bin. I didnāt manage to make labels for anything so hopefully people figure it out 
