Pallet wood makes for wonderfully cheap wood for a lot of projects, but a lot of people who are first starting out have trouble disassembling a pallet. While the task is rather straight forward it can take a seriously long time without the right tools for the job. When done properly a pallet can be broken down in 5-10 minutes.
Know Your Pallet Types
Pallets come in a variety of different types. These all have different industrial uses and will yield different amounts of scrap wood. Before you take a pallet apart you should know at least what kin of pallet you are working with so you don’t miss any sneaky nails before they go through your saw!
The five main types of pallets (in North America) are:
- Block Pallets – These have 9 wood blocks that hold them together allowing for forklifts to enter them from either side. The wood blocks are not often easy to use scrap.
- Stringer Pallets – These have planks between the boards instead of blocks which typically limit the way a forklift can enter them to the front and back. They also come in a four way entry variety which has notches in the stringer planks for side entry from a fork lift. The two way string pallets yield the most scrap wood.
- Double Faced Pallets – These are pallets that are flip-able and can be used face up or face down. They have a bit more wood scrap than other types, but gaps are usually larger.
- Double Wing Pallets – These are pallets that have board which extend beyond the structural supports like little “wings”.
- Solid Deck Pallets – These are much rarer than other types of pallet in that they are not made up of top planks, but instead of a solid sheet of wood. When you can find these you can get good sheet wood for making all sorts of things, but because of their structure most people don’t discard these and instead clean and reuse them.
While it might seem like a lot to remember, it’s really mostly the same with small differences here and there. Block pallets have less wood and hard to use blocks, double faced, two-way, stringer pallets are going give you the most wood to work with, but also have the most nails to remove.
The Easiest Part – Prying a Pallet Apart
When you want to disassemble your pallet you’ll want to make sure you have a long handle pry bar. There are special pry bars for doing this specific task, but really anything with a good hook and a 4-6 foot bar should make quick work of a pallet.
The idea when prying the planks apart is that you want to be able to anchor the pallet with your foot and use the pry bar as a lever between the planks. You also want to pry as close your nails as possible to keep your wood from splitting.
If your pry bar doesn’t have a long enough prying end you may run into some issues. Ideally you want something that is almost an L shape and split at the end so you can apply pressure on either side of where the wood is nailed down. People who take apart pallets frequently often weld themselves special pry bar ends, but this is by no means necessary to take apart a pallet well, it just makes the job go faster.
Once everything is apart, you should be left will a pile of wood that contains a lot of nails.
Removing Nails From Pallet Wood
When you want to remove nails from pallet wood you have two main options. The first is a hammer which is where everyone starts. It takes a long time as you need to hammer the nails out and then use the claw to pull them the rest of the way.
The much easier way that is way faster is to get a pneumatic air punch nail remover. These are relatively inexpensive, you can get one on Amazon for like $50, but they require an air compressor. You can think of these like a reverse nail gun. Simply place the end over the nail, pull the trigger, and voila! It punches the nail out the other side of the board. This is by far the fastest way to remove nails from pallet wood.
Final Step, Double Checking Your Wood
A lot of people stop their deconstruction process after they get all the nails out of the ends, but this is a foolish thing to do. Pallets can have metal bits embedded in them or extra nails you didn’t catch hanging out. While these aren’t so bad to find early with a hand tool, running them into an expensive table saw is a pricey mistake to make. In addition to being excessively dangerous you blades or the saw itself can be damaged when it hits stray metal.
To prevent this we recommend that you always check your wood with a handheld metal detector. You can get one of these online for like $30, which is way cheaper than replacing a saw blade or your tools themselves. Invest early in a nail finder and save yourself a lot of heartache later on.
What’s Next?
Now you know how to take apart a pallet with ease. It’s not very complicated, but little tricks like using a long handle pry bar and a pneumatic nail remover can save you hours of time. Once you’ve got your clean wood you can easily sort it into bins for later use, clean it up further, or move into project glue ups making slabs or boards. Pallet wood is a great and inexpensive intro into the woodworking hobby, just don’t let pallet disassembly take up all your time!