Pallet People: Last Experiment Of The Season

[This is a follow-up to this post and these follow-up photos.]

I got a bunch of comments. They’re roughly split between discussion of clever nail removers / other gadgets and folks who are like “pallets are only pallets”. Plus a smattering of “watch out for chemicals”. I wasn’t ready to give up. I gave it one more try.

Unfortunately the tractor repair shop where I scrounge pallets was already prepped for winter. Someone had used a skid steer to push everything into a ditch. I can’t complain; it’s their ditch and their pallets. I grabbed what I could and wound up with a pathetic haul.

Not very promising. I dutifully brought a pallet into my shop.

And disassembled it.

Aside from the hunk of 2″x6″ I’d found, it sucked (and the 2″x6″ wasn’t great).

90% of it wound up cut into firewood. Here’s some nail free firewood.

The rest was pretty nasty… but I burned it anyway.

I’ve made it several more days without dipping into my “real firewood”, so suppose it’s a “success”. It’ll probably last a few more days. I’ve got a couple more very dismal pallets out in the lawn. It all got soaked in a driving rainstorm. I’m in no hurry to drag that junk through the mud into my clean-ish shop. It’ll probably keep Betsy running another week or so.

So that’s it for now. I assume there won’t be any pallets until spring tractor implement sales season.

In related but not pallet news, I’ve been having a ball messing around in my workshop. I finished the miter saw table, made some sawhorses, used them to fix an old wooden ladder, and am halfway through yet another building project. The sawhorses got me pondering some “woodworking philosophy” (I probably think too much!). I’ll post about that whenever I can tear myself away from Betsy and settle back in front of my computer long enough to type it up. (I don’t own a laptop. Otherwise I’d be blogging from my workbench because it’s near the warm woodstove.)

A.C.

P.S. In entirely unrelated “news”, I finally got my white elephant PITA house generator back in service. Just in time, because it’ll snow soon and I didn’t want to be messing with that in mid-winter.

P.S.2. This post goes live just before Halloween. Once my favorite holiday, I’m sitting this one out. I live far too remote to have actual trick-or-treat kids come to me and I’m not “feeling it” to go to a party or whatnot. Even so, happy Halloween y’all.