Working With Pallet Wood

Working with material from pallets is all the rage these days. So what we wanna look at here is giving you some advice on if you wanna do this in your shop, what do you need to do to try to get a pallet apart and get that wood out of it? And then what do we do to protect equipment to make sure nothing bad is gonna happen to our woodworking tools when we're working with pallet wood? So first thing, let's look at a little bit of disassembly. And I'm gonna make this crazy easy.

And step one, we're gonna go with a saber saw, jigsaw. And running the blade right along the rail on the outside of the pallet. How's that? Mission accomplished. Now, there's good new and there's bad news.

The good news is it was really easy to get that piece out of the pallet. The bad news is it's crazy short. If that lends itself to your projects, that is far and away the easiest way to get wood out of a pallet. Let's look at a couple of other options. So we're gonna talk about and use a flat bar and a cat's paw.

So here's what we're up against. A lot of times pallets are put together with pneumatic nailers, and they use spiral nails. So the spiral nails, the thread isn't quite like a screw thread, but it's almost like that. It's a little bit slower spiral. But pneumatic nails means, pneumatic nailer, they really sink the heads below the surface of the wood.

Spiral on the nail means it really gets a good bite into the material, and so it can make it really hard to get a grip and get these parts apart. If the pallet is made out of hardwood, and a lot of times they are, then that makes it even worser because the harder the wood, the better grip that that nail is gonna have. Not a bad idea to throw on a pair of gloves 'cause these things can be pretty splintery. So here's what I'm gonna try first with the flat bar, and that is to come in under the edge of a piece and gently pry up. And the gently part is gonna be important here because it's pretty easy to splinter this stuff.

And what I'd like to do is get the wood to start, then push the wood back down and come after the nailhead. So let's see how this works. I'm gonna come in here. Pry up real easy. See if I gained enough.

All right, nailhead is already starting to come out. Can see how the spiral nails really have a bite. All right, we might've just busted the head off that one, so we're gonna deal with that some more later. This is what we're up against, big crack. Let's try her on this side, nice and gentle.

And then back down to see if we can get to the head. Now, on this one, instead of the flat bar on the head, let's try our cat's paw. And the reason being, this might give us a better bite on the body of the nail. Not quite up enough yet. There we go, that's the sound of a nail pulling.

This is a tough one. All right, I'm gonna take a new approach here. There we go. So what I was doing with the hammer is tapping on the cat's paw to help seat it on the nail. That doesn't bother me much.

I'm gonna show you a way to go after those. All right, it's gonna be more of the same. So I'm gonna keep working on this pallet, and I'm gonna get what I can off of it. Oh, yay. All right, there's a good view of the spiral nail that we're up against.

So I'm gonna keep going after these boards, see what else I can get off of here. The other thing that we can do with a cat's paw, if you can't get under the board or it's not bringing the nail with it, the benefit to the cat's paw is with those sharp tips, we can drive that under the nailhead. The bad news is we're gonna put a big dig in the surface here. If you do this approach, you wanna go with the grain, not across the grain. So starting in kind of a downward direction, we gotta drive it under the nailhead and I'm taking it real easy on the pull, trying to get that nail started.

There we go. If you like rustic, we're giving it to you. All right, back to work for me. Then we'll come back and have a look at a few more things going on here. Let me give you a flat bar subtlety.

When I drive that flat bar in, I wanna get it in as far as I can so that if we look inside here, a nail's down in there, and I drive this in. I'd like to have that flat bar surrounding the nail. So when I start to pry and the pressure's coming up, I'm completely surrounding the head of that nail, and that's gonna help reduce the amount of cracking that we get. And you'll be able to feel it and maybe hear it. So right there, I think I just got up against metal.

And then this is a race that goes to the slow and steady, not the swift 'cause if you go too fast, you're gonna crack that stuff. Like that. And I think as soon as you can see that that nail has started to come up, push the wood back down. Expose the head, and then go to a hammer or a flat bar or a cat's paw to try to extract that nail. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.

Hoping and praying always helps. All right, now these busted nails. Here's a specialty tool. It's just for pulling nails. This is called the Extractor.

This is called the Extractor, part number HL1121. Look it up on the worldwide interweb. It's designed just for getting nails out. Let me get this guy to stand up. It's kinda like a mix between pliers and a claw hammer.

The jaws grab that nail. Give it a squeeze, and then rock it back. Okay, so even though we lost the head on that nail, it gives us the opportunity to get it out. All right, now let's come over here to this one. I started working on this off-camera.

So we're pretty loose here. And the point I wanna make with this one is that if you start to destroy the head and it kinda strips out, and I think this one is about to. Like that. I'm okay with that because by eliminating the head of the nail, I can pull the wood through there. Let's see if I can get that one out.

Gotta come up. Oh, might be able to catch it with the cat's paw. Think we're about to strip a head. You might've figured out this is way more of an art than a science, so, hey, if you got ideas about getting these babies apart, post 'em in the comments. Everybody's gonna love to see 'em.

Now, one of the things you're gonna want is a metal detector. I'm pretty sure I've got the nails out of this area, but if we wanna use that rail in the project, I would definitely run a metal detector over it to make sure all the metal is out of it. I'm gonna take this board I just released from captivity and run it through a sander so we can clean it up, see what it looks like, and give us some idea of why the heck are we salvaging these boards? Well, here's what we've got with that slat. One thing you wanna do before you start running this through tool is I'd take a wire brush to it and make sure all the dirt and stuff...

You can really see on these lower rails just what kind of junk has built up on there. But anyway, I ran this through a surface sander, and I got this side pretty well cleaned up, a little bit of the rough sawn on there. On this face, in the woodworking industry, we'd call this hit or miss, which is I sanded it some, but I didn't take it completely down to where it's cleaned up 'cause I think if you're after a rustic look, this is probably the kind of thing that you want. Now, with the whole cat's paw thing, we're digging those claws into a face, but that's gonna happen on one face. Should leave us with a back face that obviously it'll still have nail holes in it, but it doesn't have the cat paw digs.

So that's my best advice, to date anyway, on getting these pallets to come apart relatively cleanly. Like I said, you got ideas, please pass 'em along. Put 'em in the comments, and people would love to see what you're doing to get your pallets cleanly taken apart.