Wooden pallets, which are the most popular worldwide, can be made from very different types of wood (poplar, fir, pine, beech) and their performance depends on the quality and quantity of virgin material used in production.
Pallets are very simple in structure and materials: they are basically two layers of wooden planks, parallel to each other and separated by shims that are themselves made of wood, all joined by nails.
In other cases the structure of the pallet is even simpler and consists of three laths forming the base and other laths, crossed over the base laths, forming the top.
Below the pallet top must be able to fit the forklift fork for lifting the pallet itself and its load.
Dismantling a pallet then consists of unbolting the various pieces of wood from each other.
TOOL FOR DISASSEMBLING PALLETS
It sounds simple but it's not that simple, especially if we want to take it apart without ruining the wooden planks we probably want to salvage.
Reusing wood from pallets has become almost a trend among DIY enthusiasts, and we also talked about it in an article on how to cover a wall with recycled pallets.
As I said, disassembling a pallet is more labor intensive than difficult, and what we need to avoid is ruining the planks too much in which, once the nails are removed, the marks of the holes will still remain.
You can also use electric hacksaws that will make our task much easier but this is not the preferred method, albeit the most practical.
The reason is very simple: by sawing them, the nails will still remain inside the wood and this is a problem both from the point of view of aesthetics and from the point of view of subsequent work as you may ruin the tools you are going to use, planers or whatever.
By not resorting to the use of electrical systems, all that is left is elbow grease by proceeding to unscrew piece by piece.
In the demolition of the pallet it is preferable to start from the lower part because if we start from the upper part, in addition to making a greater effort, we would risk breaking the wood since the head of the nails is right at the top.
Beyond the tools already mentioned in the video we would need to add one that could take the place of the crowbar and that would allow us to pop the wooden planks more easily even while keeping the pallet on the ground instead of on a large workbench that not everyone has.
PALLET BUSTER DECK WRECKER TOOL