I sent this to my ball and chain. She's dragging home pallets left and right and does nothing with them.
I'm so sick of these smug hipsters showing these pallet projects. A pallet is basically the crappiest wood you can find. Many of the planks are broken so that they are unusable. And it takes more time to tear those things apart without breaking them, then pulling the nails out and sanding them enough to keep little Johnny from getting a six-inch spike in his eye that it's not worth it, even if they are free.
Pallets are great fun for those that don't work with them everyday. I'll pass on the arts and crafts pallet nonsense. They are just a tool to reused for moving stuff until they are too broken to use anymore.
I burn a lot of pallets for firewood in the winter. I break 'em down with a reciprocating saw and they burn great, especially since a lot of the crappy pine is considered crappy because it's full of resin! Occasionally I find one that's pretty much all fatwood, and more pitch than wood at that! Also, lots of free heavy-duty nails after the burning is done.
Back in Vermont we used to spice up our pallet bonfires by throwing about 4 or 5 old aerosol cans of whatever was on the shelf in dad's garage into the pile once it was really roaring, I remember one keg party where a lawnmower ended up on the pallet fire and it burned so hot that the engine literally melted, Pallet fires rule! Did I mention I like to burn stuff?
I worked at a temporary job for awhile for one of my friend's dads. He owned a pallet repair shop in East St Louis. (For those unfamiliar East STL is the equivalent of Watts or Harlem (back in the day). You've heard the expression "I wouldn't be caught dead there". "Dead" is the only way you would be caught there, even today. But I digress. The first day of work I find out that he hires prisoners on work release from the city jail. I never told my mom that. Hell I was only 16. I needed the money. Talk about an education on the street for me. And now I'm the minority on top of it. At any rate he's showing us how to use the pneumatic nailer in the days before OSHA really regulated (1974). So there was no trigger safety on them. He picks the nailer up to demonstrate how to keep our hands away from the business end of things and he accidentally hit the trigger. That 3 inch nail (with a head on it) goes right through the web of his hand between the thumb and index finger. It was the nastiest thing I had ever witnessed at that tender age. Sidenote to that story is the location of his business was among the freight yards of all the major railroad lines that ran through the metropolitan area. My friend's dad drank a lot. He fell asleep at the wheel starting home from work one night. His vehicle was straddling a track and he was crushed by a train and died at the hospital about a week later.
We have a 30ft long trash compactor at work and we fill it weekly with pallets. We keep and reuse the good ones. Unfortunately the guys in our warehouse don't now how to drive a forklift so the majority get smushed LoL
I use to work in a warehouse. Most of the pallets were junk pine. Occasionally i would come across a pallet made of hardwood (usually oak or cherry). You could always tell when pickinf them up. The hardwood pallets weighed 5x as much as the junk wood pallets.
Dang, need to take some pics of my pallet furniture and I'm not hipster Ofdly enough one of my pals used to make furniture from pallet wood but he couldn't find buyers because price was to high and he literally spend hundreds of hours on every piece and ended up going bankrupt...so I kinda inherited some of his pieces and they are absolutely amazing. Sold some of the tables and o ly left desk and a table fr myself. I love wood in any shape and form I must admit, who gives a donkey ass if it's pallet or old plank found in the street, love it if I can turn that into something useful and give it second life.
pal·at·a·ble [ˈpalədəb(ə)l] edible · eatable · digestible · tasty · appetizing · pleasant · acceptable · pleasing · agreeable · Oh, no ... wait .. wrong word. Nevermind. Burn it.