Sawdust is generally a nightmare for people involved with carpentry or any form of woodworking. However, if you’re comparing it with just normal dust, you’d be very wrong. Dust has its uses, but is very tricky to work with, and not to mention is usually done with industrial machinery. However, sawdust has now become a very reliable resource for our everyday lives in various cases.
Where Do You Get Sawdust?
Sawdust is the by-product of wood. Whether you’ve cut up wood, sliced it, chopped it or sent it down a wood chipper; you’ll get more and more sawdust. However, you can also notice sawdust amassing in old houses made primarily of wood. Could be from the floor or from the ceiling.
So, we’ve mentioned sawdust can be useful, but how exactly? Let’s look into ways that allow you to turn something that can be a nuisance into a reliable resource!
Uses of Sawdust
Sawdust can be incorporated with various substances and made into a lot of different mixes (wood flour, wood glue etc), and you’ll learn how to manipulate these substances to help you deal with irksome problems! Whether you’re dealing with a problem in your home walls or shop floor, you could find a way to make sawdust help you out and be content!
Filling in holes
Sawdust can be a very useful resource in helping to fill up holes you may have in your walls. Accidents do happen, and they may lead to an inconvenient hole in your wood walls or your floor. So, why not make use of this ‘wood dust’? All you need is some sawdust and glue, and then mix them both up well. This mixture is known as wood flour. When you mix sawdust with glue, you might be worried about some issues such as glue dripping down your wall or seeping through it. However, you don’t need to worry about it, as this ‘wood glue’ remains in a state where it is completely bounded properly.
So, whenever you see a hole that annoys you, grab some glue and sawdust, and fix it yourself. Don’t need a handyman when you can do it yourself!
Clean your Spills
Sawdust is considered the waste products of your carpentry habit, but it’s funny how this mess you create can help clean up other accidents. What do we mean? Well, let’s say you were really excited about painting something, but you end up spilling some of it over on your floor or table. At this point, you’re always worried about it just leaving a stain. However, if you’ve got some sawdust around and you’re fast enough, then just use that to clean it up!
Throw some sawdust on to the paint and then add a little bit of water to it, creating a wood flour. Use a mop to help you navigate this mess for a little bit and scrape it properly. After a while, you’ll notice the paint coming off slowly but surely!
Light Fires
If you’re out camping or you’re trying to cook up a barbeque and you can’t get a fire to start, sawdust can be an easy fire starter! It comes from wood, so duh it has to be a great conductor for heat right? If you have some candle wax around, melt all of it and then mix it up with your sawdust. This process needs to be done while the wax is still liquid, and afterwards you leave this mix in a mold for it to harden. The blocks that are created afterwards are highly flammable (so be careful!) and can just be thrown into some fire for it to spark up!
Clean Ups
If you’re living somewhere that has you worried about dust every now and then, it must be very annoying. However, even in this case sawdust can save you time. All you have to do is sprinkle your sawdust over the dusty area and then gently add some water to it.
Since sawdust is an extremely good absorbent, it’ll work with the water to ensure the dust or muck on your floor is carried along with it. You’ll want to use a broom for this job, as it will allow you to manage the clutter without getting it on you!
Drying your Hands
Now, this comes in real handy when you’re doing carpentry. Say you start sweating or you used some liquid (such as oil) for your work, but you want an easy way to just dry off your hands before operating any other machinery. Well all that sawdust that you’ve accumulated from your work? Just get a bunch of it and rub it on your hands just like soap! Unfortunately wood shavings aren’t an option for this job, but some sawdust will dry your hands up real quick!
Just keep rubbing your hands with a bunch of it and soon you’ll feel them become dry. However, they won’t make your hands clean though! You’ll definitely need to properly scrub your hands after you’re done working!
Soil Erosion
If you have a landscape of dirt around you which often suffers from erosion, then you can also use sawdust to fight that. Amazing right? Whenever you want to do this, make sure to create a mulch with your sawdust. You’ll need water, sawdust and some manure or nitrogen supplements to help create a good batch of it. Just help incorporate this mulch into your ground, and over time you’ll notice it become luscious!
This is a list of some great uses for sawdust with an in-depth description for each of them, but you can always help yourself innovate new ways to understand its uses even better, or research different uses for sawdust! However, if you’re ever unclear on how to go about these processes, then take a look at the video down below!
The Takeaway
Sawdust is one of the most abundant resources nowadays, so much so that you could make sawdust city out of it! Jokes aside, despite this just being wood dust, and different from wood shavings and wood chips; it provides a much more diverse set of uses. So for now set aside your wood shavings, and make sure not to waste this wood dust anymore by just throwing it out!
Help yourself become content with how you set up your garden, or fix the minor problems within your homes. Not only will it save you money, but you’ll always be able to avoid hassle when it comes to these problems!
Hey there, my name’s Braden Smith and all my lifeI’ve been passionate about woodworking. As such, I spent more time learning about and experimenting with power tools. Over time, I learned to help spread my knowledge by articulating my words thanks to my academic knowledge in the English Language as well.