As I sit here musing over what ballscrew lengths etc I need, my butterfly mind drifted into what am I going to do with all the swarf and offcuts (assuming of course my machine actually manages to cut aluminium ;) ) and what do others on here do with the waste?

Reason I ask is most of the pieces I will be making are going to be fairly complex shapes, milled/routed out of blocks of aluminium and having played about with a couple of CAM programs I'll be doing that out of fairly oversized blocks, so that I can a. have tabs to hold the piece in place within the block and b. drill indexing holes for "dowels" or bolts, so that I can flip the piece for multi sided cutting. This is obviously going to lead to a fair chunk of "waste" aluminium, some of which will probably not be able to be used for smaller parts.

I had this probably crazy idea of melting said waste down into new ingots for refacing and use in other pieces (assuming of course grade (6061/7075 etc) is not critical to the recycled material.

Does anyone know of a facility that does this for a small fee, or is it best to save it up and just get scrap prices?.....thoughts?

Cheers


Chris