I had a couple of European pallets in the shop, and looking at the saber saw I couldn’t resist. Whenever I needed pallet lumber to use on a project I resorted to my mallet method to disassemble a pallet , but the idea of removing the nails from the pallet, or cutting the nails in some way, we all had for sure at some point. . The cutting blades of a saber saw are quite long, and since they are wide they are quite strong, so I thought it was worth trying to cut the nails from the pallet.
In principle, the theory is simple: with a metal cutting blade on the saw, we put the saber between the pallet boards or between a board and a block and we start cutting. Of course, we have to do a little force since the wooden boards of the pallet tighten the saber, making it difficult to advance. But you have to know how to contain the force after cutting the last nail, since at that moment the resistance that presses and contains the advance of the saber is lost, and we can fall forward against the pallet.
The biggest problem is that sometimes the saber hits one of the nails very precisely, and instead of cutting it, it hits it, causing the best hybrid table saw to bounce backwards. Most of the time we can cut those nails by changing the area from where we put the saber, but if we disassemble many pallets and it happens to us with too many nails, the saw will surely end up suffering from those blows.
One way to disassemble the pallet but avoid hitting the nails is to regulate the support base to ensure that the saber does not reach the furthest nails in any case, and then cut those nails from another position from which we arrive without problems. . Although with a pallet with wide boards like the European one, that is not always possible. What we should not do is remove the base in an attempt to increase the useful length of the saber since we must always keep it resting on the wood to avoid rebounding. If we remove it, we would end up with the portables head bouncing against the wood.
The simplest part remains before you can use this pallet wood, remove the rusty nails from the pallet. As they are cut, only small pieces remain in the wood. With a drift or using another nail and a hammer we hit them so that they come out on the other side and we remove them by prying them with the hammer or with pliers.
But if you are going to cut or brush the boards and you don’t want to spoil your DIY machines, you have to make sure that there are no hidden nails in the wood. The cutting disc of your circular saw and the blades of your electric planer will appreciate it. I have a small metal detector for DIY tasks with which I make sure there are no hidden pieces. So I can remove all pallet nails and smoothly planing the wood.
A European pallet is made up of 11 boards, 8 of them long and the other 3 short. As you can see in the video, the short board in the center needs to be cut to access the nails in the center, so in principle we would recover 10 boards. In this case, I found a rotten board and another one that was already broken, so I only recovered 8 boards to recycle. But one of the advantages of this method, compared to the mallet method I mentioned earlier, is that by cutting the nails we make sure that no boards are broken while dismantling the pallet, something that I couldn’t guarantee when hitting it with the mace. So we can get better wooden boards to make our furniture with pallets .
