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One guy at the scrapyard changed my mind about using pallet wood
I used to be one of those people who would never put pallet wood on a workbench. Too soft, too full of nails, too many splinters. Then last month I was at the metal recycler in Tulsa digging through the scrap bin for some angle iron and this older dude, maybe 70, was loading up a stack of oak pallets that looked like they came off a printing press. I asked him why he bothered. He just looked at me and said, "Son, that pallet held 2,000 pounds of paper for ten years. Your bench only holds a vise." He showed me how to break them down with a circular saw set to 1 inch depth so you cut the nails clean, not pull them. Took me a Saturday to rebuild my whole bench top with three layers of that oak, glued and screwed. Cost me zero dollars and about eight hours. The nail trick alone saved me so much cussing. Has anyone else tried cutting pallets apart instead of prying the boards loose? That made all the difference for me.
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uma_baker9922d ago
Cutting at one inch depth only works if the boards are thick enough and the nails are in the right spot. Half the pallets I've pulled apart have nails buried deep in the slats or staples that sit lower than that, so your blade hits metal anyway and now you've wrecked a good saw blade on top of it. And calling all pallet wood "oak" is a stretch, a lot of the ones I see are soft junk pine that dents if you look at it wrong. A bench top is the one place you can't afford soft wood, because every time you hammer on something you're carving dents into it. Plus you have no idea what was on those pallets. Some of them get sprayed with bug poison or sit in chemical plants for years, and dragging that stuff into your shop is a bad trade for saving a few bucks. Just buy a couple of 2x10s at the lumber yard and be done with it.
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