How to Choose and Break Down Pallets

so in this video I'm going to be breaking down all these pallets right here for a project I'm doing in the near future and you know in the past I've broken down pallets you know Hammer Nails pry bars that kind of stuff it just takes a long time in this video I'm trying a few new techniques to me to hopefully make this a lot more efficient so I'm just not wasting money on labor processing free material there's kind of a conundrum right there but before I get there I kind of need to piss off probably half the people that are watching this video right off the get-go and ex talk about the material because I have to admit I am not a fan of rustic pieces I am not a fan of shabby chic I'm not a fan of patinaed works from the get-go you know a piece of furniture that survives hundreds of years and gathers a natural patina honestly I respect that because as a a representation of the Craftsman they built something that could last that long and they take that kind of abuse I love those pieces but to build something brand new to make it look somewhat decrepit that that just turns me off it goes against my Craftsman skills now that's purely my opinion also if you've noticed even the pieces I build out of construction Lumber which I build a lot of them for my home furniture I do everything I can to get away from anything that isn't just absolutely perfect straight grain I don't like the wavy grains I don't like the knots and stuff like that so using basically the worst material that they can produce the cheapest stuff that they can buy the stuff that they don't expect to last even six months in high-end pieces that's just not going to be me so you have to understand the properties of the material to find a proper application for that and for me that's outdoor stuff because in outdoor projects this type of material you're basically just using it for a barrier you know you're building a composting bin you're just trying to keep the dirt out from the side and have it look uniform You're Building bird houses you're sticking them up on the tree you want them to age to gray the birds will like them that way you don't expect them to last too long it's just a barrier hence when I am using pallet wood cut for projects I am not surfacing it I am not going to be running these things through my expensive power tools I'm not going to damage them that way I I worked hard to pay for that kind of stuff I had thought at one time about maybe you know running them through my drum sander with a really heavy grit you know something like a 20 grit really thick things so that even if I ran over a nail or something like that there is no way I could damage the drum but I'm not even going to risk that myself if I had to do any kind of Surface Prep to the board that project needs to be to me needs to be something more than pallet wood I will cross cut them all day long with a circular saw I'll even rip them to certain sizes using my circular saw because that while nice isn't that big a loss if something goes wrong now how I use those pallets kind of determines what kind of pouch I like to collect up and I pass over probably 95 percent of them I have a couple of stops in my town that are along my normal path and as I'm driving by if I look over I see one that I'm going like I'll pick it up and throw in the back of my truck and then I just kind of send them over here to collect like a lot of pallet hoarders to do but you know there's a lot of information out there about what good pallets are what bad pouts are you know the different Paints the different codes that kind of stuff went on them the places I go to typically are going to be one one-time use kind of pallets and uh they're generally going to be the bigger ones I prefer palettes that are extremely long because that gives me the longest boards that I can divide up the standard style palettes of what they're about three by four feet right there a they typically use thinner boards so I get less material but also because of the way I break them apart to get good quality material for my projects the boards are just too short for a lot of things I like to do so typically I tried to stare clear the short standard style ones and go for the longer ones that are going to get me both wider boards and longer boards now a lot of people whenever they pick out board pallets they tend to look for the hardwood Styles and ones and steer care of the pine ones to me it doesn't really matter because it is going to be an outdoor project and because I am not going to be surfacing them they're going to have all these blemishes and stuff on them staining so more than likely I'm throwing paint on top of that and once you paint a piece of wood you can't really tell too easily whether it's Pine Poplar or mahogany which you know occasionally you will find in pallets but the most of the stuff I'm looking for are these slats and they're generally about a half inch thick which is another reason why I'm not going to be surfacing them because if you surface it you're going to be down to 3 8 and a quarter inch and who wants to work with that thin stuff also you occasionally will use the the side pieces the two by fours but not very often because you know on a palette like this you got a solid board all the way across but for most of the time what you get is boards with these cutouts right here can you see that so that's for the fork Forks to go into uh so generally basically your two by four now becomes a strength of a two by two because you've cut that board in half but if you're planking it on both sides and you want to do a kind of a stick frame hey why not a doghouse doesn't really need to be that strong a two by two is more than strong enough you're just going to have a little bit extra air in the walls which hey that adds air adds insulation other things you need to notice about pallet wood is the outsides take a huge amount of abuse they get dragged on they get oil smudges on from the forklifts all that kind of stuff so to me just like when I buy construction Lumber or or six quarter hardwood and stuff like that that last inch or two of the boards top and bottom that needs to be cut off first you don't want all that stuff getting into your project affecting your paints all that kind of stuff plus it's the fact that because these boards were so green whenever they put them on there typically your cracks there's always going to be some cracks even though you don't see them so if you just cut off that little inch it just it makes the boards more durable they're not going to fall apart in the later date because I'm probably going to be using for the full length of it in my products so if the cracks are already established right there I don't want to be nailing into that so I guess like everything else I do it's kind of always about the grain the type of project determines the type of material I'm going to be collecting and how I process it is determined by the material step itself but since basically all I'm using is a slats and just a few of those stretchers I'm going to be creating a lot of ways so my first step in processing pallets is to start a fire so here are the tools I used to use to break apart pallets of course a nice heavy framing hammer I have a pry bar that helped a lot to get the nails up I would also use a hoe because you could kind of wedge it and pull it up but a lot of times because these boards are so thin I would end up breaking a board with this thing and then a Sawzall to cut the ends off to make my life easier in my last video which I'll link to here I want to replace all of these with something that I can just stand up and use I don't want to bend over as often so I built myself a pallet Buster and along with that I'm just going to use a circular saw this time and hopefully with these two tools I should be able to knock all this out so first things first this one right here I'm not going to be saving these side pieces because I got the cut out and for this project I don't really need them so I'm going to go ahead and cut off both sides all the way around so I separate the spine from the edges foreign buster the idea behind the pallet Buster is it's just going to roll along this board and be able to lift up the pouch evenly whereas my claw hammer would pick up one side and a lot of times it would break them so here we go up underneath lift easy nail stay in it so I'm just going to create a pile that I know that there are Nails in them now there are a lot of boards in this stack like this one right here that I'm not going to be keeping so just pick and choose what you want to keep because it's all free so it doesn't really matter if you waste a little bit from there it's just a matter of rinsing repeat jumping through the stack and end up with a whole bunch of boards with nails sticking out of them now some things I've discovered by using you know a pallet Buster is if you have a pallet that has really large cutouts and stuff like that this goes in your don't waste your time I'm just smashing these things up it's going to take so much more labor to get these out uh just too much lever against that point also I found out that while cutting it is a process I'm going to do before I put it into a project just because of all those splits and stuff like that it doesn't really saved much time I just do the outsides first and then prep the insides next you start with the insides it just all goes wrong now with these European style ones it really is better to cut these off because you're getting rid of a huge chunks and I can't get my uh a little pry bar around this but I can't come in at an angle on these interior ones and then I'll just have to use a hammer on the other one because there's just nothing left to leverage against it because they only put cross beams on one side with the rest of them you can kind of use this on the side to wedge it up a little bit and then stick this underneath to do the rest foreign cross boards because there's only one of them and then you can just take it to a workbench to hammer them out and after that you end up with this a pile of magazine tetanus injectors this right here is why I hate palette working with pallet wood because you know honestly up until what I'm going to attempt today this was a weeks of work for me not a constant week but I can't stand to do this for more than 30 45 minutes it's boring as hell it's frustrating I get angry so you know it's outdoor wood anyway so I would just kind of leave this pile here I'd come out I put in my podcaster a podcast and I just sit here for until I got frustrated and then I walk away and it just took a week to get through a pile like this now here's the way I used to do it I'd pull out my chopping block with a trash can underneath it and I'd go grab me a big ass Hammer a framing hammer and then various prying tools now this one right here I didn't use too often it was mainly just for uh small Nails because you can kind of sink it down this way and pull it up I have this one right here never really liked it I always felt it kind of dented the wood a little bit too much and it's cumbersome this was my favorite though I have to admit that a lot of times I just use a claw on the hammer right here and basically the monotonous process was I'd come over here and I would hope and pray that the nails were straight because if they weren't straight you would have to somewhat straighten them out then you would just tap them down if you were lucky they would blast out the back side but normally they don't and then you would come over and pry them out also helps to have a magnet for after the fact is not not all of them will land in the trash can I did that for a long time and then I saw somebody online that did it this way they used their demolition saw with a really long metal blade I just don't happen to have one with this new saw right here and they would simply cut off the nails foreign so you would do a whole board almost at once with that big long nail you just kind of like that then you come along with a nail punch and just kind of whack at it with a slightly smaller hammer blast them through as you can see they don't always come out can you see what he was traded over time and I hated this aspect of the project well I didn't want to do that anymore so a lot of people have been using these pneumatic nailers so I did my little research and I found one one inexpensive brand that a lot of people will recommend I'll put a link down to my Amazon affiliate account if you want to get it but I'm going to try it out on half of this pile and then I'll come back and talk about it oh and the nail gun that people were recommending was this specific air Locker Air punch nail I picked mine up for about 50 bucks on Amazon it was on a discount at the time I will tell you initial Impressions okay and disappointed okay that it seems pretty solid it's all metal this little plastic rubber thing is on a metal handle that kind of stuff it does not come with a air connector nozzle right here and the instructions for this are the worst I've ever seen but it's kind of typical Chinese that you know they don't really care about doing instructions with you oh I don't have them here it was basically a one-page deal and they had stuff like you know you need to oil it but they didn't tell didn't tell you how much to put in I just assume it's just one or two drops every time you use it uh just like a regular air nail gun but they did say that using too much would be detrimental to it could be just copying out in the entire in the instructions they told you really big bold letters do not exceed the air pressure recommended in the manual the manual being one page that didn't have a foot pounds of pressure anywhere on it I actually had to go look it up online it wasn't even engraved on it which most tools would do and it said between 70 and 120 that's a big variable right there so I don't know about that so once again initial feel it's a solid device but man instructions and the packaging yeah meh foreign okay so I'm now about one podcast and so you know about 45 minutes and I'm two-thirds of the way through the pile I would say I got a nice stack right over there I'll show you in a second and my initial impression I ain't never doing this again without some kind of dramatic gun I'm actually kind of impressed this thing has a big huge metal thing on the front for lack of a better term I'm going to call it an anvil but basically you put it down over it and you can actually straighten bent Nails up I do suggest that you go all the way down you push forward and then you put some pressure down because if there's any recoil back I find that the nails don't go all the way through and I cranked at the pressure on this thing too it is uh looking a little under 90. I'm also kind of impressed that it seems to be fairly efficient on this small tank that I have it's a I think one point four gallons it's only cranked over turned back on twice in this whole time now you occasionally crumb across uh you know nails that are halfway down basically you just push this forward until it stops on that one and then just bend it back up so that you can put that all the way to the ground so to me this was definitely worth the money just the amount of time it's saving me doing this and the fact that I'm not frustrated at that I've actually sat here through the full uh podcast and you know I'm still willing to keep going on it I will say this you definitely need ear protection my little air pods have been working just fine I put them in after I got going because I realized how loud it is and I just took them out to start filming again and yeah this thing is loud well there you go probably two hours worth of Labor with that new pneumatic gun technique and again that gun was new to me and uh my only recommendation is y'all saw it work here I got that particular model recommended from other channels so there might be better options out there but for me 50 bucks it saved me quite a bit of time but more importantly frustration and I now have material that I'm ready to cut to length and nail into a specific projects what do you think I'm making well I hope you learned a few trips tips and techniques along the way and in the end I want you to remember that it's always worth the effort to learn create and share with others be safe have fun

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 40,850

Keywords: wortheffort, pallet, free, wood, pnuematic, Pneumatic, air, gun, nailer, remover, palletwood, take apart, tear, teardown, down

Id: vhl6zxJbf3k

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023