Pallets are these wooden frames that go under shit that’s getting shipped and stored in warehouses, to hold it off the ground so you can get a forklift under it. Shit that needs shipping is all sorts of shapes and sizes, and forklifts are pretty much all the same size, so you pack your stuff up into pallet loads and then use a fork lift to load it into big containers.

There are a lot of web pages that claim that pallet wood is good for building stuff that has a sort of “rustic” or “antique” look. This is arguably true, since the wood gets put through hell. Random piles of stuff get heaped on it, people toss it around with forklifts, throw it in containers, and ship it across the ocean in a metal box.

Unfortunately, these claims that you can build crafty crap out of pallets are built on the assumption that you can take pallets apart for their wood. This is not the case. It’s almost like someone designed them to survive international shipping.

Being a cheapskate, I got a couple of pallets, because I want to make a sleeping platform for my shitty, beat-up car. Since pallets are also shitty and beat up, it seemed appropriate.

This guy claims that if you make a pallet pal, you can take pallets apart easily. I didn’t pay for his plans, and my knock-off made it about 2/3 of the way through one pallet before disintegrating. Maybe if I bought the plans I’d have had better luck.

Then I tried making something like this only for not $70. I didn’t spend that $50 on a welder to not weld shit, dammnit.

Yeah, that failed. First the tines of the fork part bent, and once I bent them back into shape, I snapped the weld that held the handle on. Then I welded it back together and bent the handle instead. Turns out, with enough leverage, I can bend 1″ angle iron by hand.

It turns out that even if you can get the pallets apart, getting the fasteners out is a whole other mess. Some of them are held together with staples, some with nails, and something like 100+ fasteners per pallet. They’re not even good for burning, because you end up with hundreds of nails in your burn area.