Worth-It Tips and Ideas for Designing Granny Flats

If you need sheet metal fabricating services, then you understand that certain pieces are sometimes cut off to create the desired end-product. These 'waste' pieces of metal are called off-cuts. They are too small to be re-used for any meaningful fabrication process. Plus, they have very irregular cut-out shapes. Unfortunately, most people never bother with this waste. They leave it with the fabrication firms. However, this doesn't have to be the norm. You can always ask for your off-cut pieces and make use of them as explained below.

What to do with them?

So you might be wondering: how can these off-cut sheet metal pieces be important and what use are they? Once you collect the off-cut pieces produced from the fabrication process, store them. If you are planning to seek other sheet fabrication services in future, let your stock of off-cut sheet metal pile up. Once you have a sizeable amount of this metal waste, find a scrap metal recycler near you and sell it to them. If you manage to gather a huge amount of these off-cuts, the recycler will organize the removal process for you using skip bins or trucks.

Why bother with sheet metal off-cuts anyway?

When you seek sheet metal fabrication services, you have to buy complete sheets from the fabrication company or from a different supplier. This means that you own 100% of the metal sheets. A simple reason to ask for the off-cut metal sheets, therefore, is because they belong to you. Most people do not bother doing so because they do not need them. They also consider them as waste that will need time and/or energy to dispose.

Benefits of disposing of your sheet off-cuts

Collecting and disposing your sheet metal off-cut waste has several benefits:

1. You will make some money by reselling the off-cuts as scrap metal. Scrap metal is sold as per the spot price of metal in the international market, per ounce or kilo. The more metal you have, therefore, the more money you stand to make.
2. By reselling the metal waste, you will be undertaking your own small role in recycling. Scrap metal reuse helps to protect metal ore from being mined out of the earth. This not only conserves mining areas, it also conserves energy that would have otherwise been used to produce new metal sheets.

As you can imagine, recycling your sheet metal off-cuts works best if you have many sheets being fabricated. If you only have one or a few sheets being worked on, it might not be worth it taking on their recycling by yourself.