Recycling is cool no matter how you look at it. Kids love it when you recycles an old shoe into a bird house. Old people love it you take them to thrift stores and they get a new pair of glasses or teeth. I love recycling wood. I can take a perfectly good board and create a table or chair that will be perfect firewood in two years. I can repair a dresser drawer that will hold cloths for another year and then make it termite food in the back of the shed. I need to burn that thing because termites generate tons of CO2 every year and burning that dresser will only release about twelve pounds of carbon dioxide.
I collect old pallet and packing wood to build unrequired or non functional furniture. I have been doing it for years as my part of the recycling thing. My biggest problem with recylced pallets and pack in wood is the nails and screws used to assemble them. The nails are down right Draconian and blessed by Satan himself. The nails have these twisty bodies like so many minions in a cauldron. They are one way streets of hell. Pulling them out is close to impossible without destroying the wood itself. You will end up breaking them off in the wood creating destruction to future saw blades that may encounter them. I have devised a removal method that is nothing short of inspired. I hook my electric welder up to the nail heads and send 50,000 volts through those tough guys until the wood around the nail heads are charcoal and then the nails come right out. Some of them fall out. I can handle most small fires easy enough.
The screws are usually just your simple deck screws of various non standard lengths. But there are those that cannot be removed because of some deal with no slots. They were inserted with a gun. There is no way these things are coming out. I do not even collect this wood if I notice those screws. They are such a waste of wood. There are those that have that square drive head. I have yet to find a drive that will fit in that bung hole . It is some Wentworth bull shit probably. Anyway if the screws are not 1.4 inches long, they are 5 inches long. Who the hell needs a five inch long deck screw. I challenge Bob Villa to drive one of those puppies without KY jelly. They go in 3 inches just great and then the head strips out or the damn screw just snaps off and the release pressure drives the newly broken screw shaft into your third knuckle. You have to get a pair of pliers and screw the thing out of your finger cartilage. All for some scrub oak wood that may or may not have any added value at all.
There is this wood that is used for pallets because it can be used for nothing else. It must be from that little known conifer, the Bastard tree. It looks like a nice piece of wood but if you look at it awkwardly it will split into some really nice daggers. If you are unlucky enough to get a usable board out of it, take care putting some nice stain to it, like the breathing house on Green Acres, it sucks up a quart of carnuba stain like a thirsty dog. Your worthless piece of pallet wood has obtained three hours of labor($20/hr), two pieces of sand paper ($1.23/sheet), one quart of stain($6.58/qt) and some spilled blood (priceless=no value added). Sixty nine dollars and four cents for a crooked cigar box with no cigars in it. I don't even smoke and I do not even need a box of any kind. It was a nice Saturday thought. I missed the Devil Rays on TV, I missed the PBR finals and the Balance Beam apparatus semi-finals for Women(?) at the World Championships in Bucharest. I wonder if I will feel anything if I were to shoot one of these three inch brads into my brain?
No comments:
Post a Comment