Nubbins

I was raised by parents who said their worldview was established by the Great Depression.  It was over by my time but I didn’t escape the effects of it.  Our operators manual must have been some version of Poor Richard’s Almanac - a penny saved - a penny earned and such.  We paid cash, saved every way we could and were frugal with a capital F by today’s standards.

I’m not complaining.  I think we could use a lot more of that mentality today.  Thanks, largely, to my parents I am more well off than they were but in a number of ways I carry on their attitude of wise use and simple living.  In some other ways I am more extravagant - I have a more expensive and larger house on a larger lot.  Actually, that may be about the only difference.

My training was not as severe as another friend who told me one of his parents said, “You tell me why you think you need it, and I’ll explain to you why you don’t.”

Well, with that as the background, I was reflecting upon my habit of collecting all the cutoff nubbins of scrap for reuse.  Most go into the tumbler to serve as aggregate until I find another use for them as filler metal or some more specific role.

I have  written about this earlier in the context of the “no scrap” shop, added value and probably elsewhere.  I trimmed some die saddle tangs so they would hang in their racks better and picked up the drops, tumbled them and kept them for adding onto other tangs which might be a bit length deficient.

I’ll never break the habit of picking up all the nubbins and using them for something.  That is part of who I am.

Small drops removed from the tumbler ready for other use.