Show Me Your Pallet Projects!

[gtaus]

Easy Way to Rip 2X4's With Only a Circular Saw

I watched a short (less than 2-minute) YouTube video tonight on an easy way to rip 2X4's using only a circular saw. Sometimes I want to rip a 2X4 but don't have access to my table saw, like right now when my table saw is stored away in my other garage for the winter. Or maybe you don't have a table saw.

Check it out...

When I was making my stackable compost bins this week, I ripped a couple small 2X4 pieces to make some 2X2 legs. Using the technique in that video would have been a whole lot easier and faster than what I did. For a rough cut rip, I think that's a pretty good idea. I like how he just countersinks and screws the 2X4 into the edge of the pallet and goes at it. I'm not sure you would even have to use a countersink bit. I know my drill will put the screwhead below the surface of the wood if I want. But I do have countersink bits in my toolbox.

I also have a rip guide for my circular saw which works great because you set it once and can rip any number of boards afterwards without having to measure lines down the middle of a 2X4. The problem I always have is securing the 2X4 in place, so it does not move - especially for shorter pieces.

My old circular saws came with rip guides, but lots of the newer circular saws do not. You might have to buy a rip guide separately. And they are not standardized in size, so you want to be sure you get one that fits into your saw.

I don't use my rip guide very often, but it's a great accessory to have for a circular saw. A table saw would be better, of course, but when I am dealing with pallet wood, I don't want to chance ruining a good expensive table saw blade on hitting a nail I did not see in the pallet wood. I have a demolition blade for my circular saw, so even if I run into a nail, it should not damage the blade or injure me.

Bad things can happen if you hit a nail with a table saw.

FWIW, I picked up a few packs of Countersink Drill Bit Set - 4 Piece at Menards this morning. Regular price of $8.99 but only $0.99 after rebate if you take advantage of those deals. I don't know how long that rebate deal is in effect, but usually only for a week.

I picked up some of those countersink bits because they are consumables for me. They wear out and/or break and need to be replaced. But at that price after rebate, it's not so painful. I broke 2 regular drill bits this week working out in the garage, but it was not a big deal because I have a small stash of other bits I bought on sale with rebates and/or clearance prices for next to nothing.

Personally, I like to use the inexpensive blades, bits, etc... when using pallet wood. So, I am always looking for good sales on the inexpensive generic store brand consumables for my pallet wood projects hobby. No tears when I wear out, break, or damage that stuff on a nasty nail hidden in the pallet wood.

 

[ChicksnMore]

Learned a lot today...

I finished building my 4-tier stackable compost bin this afternoon. I'll be posting some pictures of my actual build in a day or two. For now, just wanted to mention that I solved the challenges I was having using pallet wood and making sure that the legs all interlocked. I learned something new when I built each of the 4 tiers. I also got faster with each successive tier. Nothing like actual experience to teach you how to do it better.

Google picture of design...

View attachment 3743142

One issue I wanted to try was using some cupped pallet wood planks for the build. I had to build and rebuild that one compost bin tier 3 times before I got it right once! Lesson learned - don't bother using cupped boards. Saving money using pallet wood is a great idea, but using cupped boards is not. At least, not for the project I was working on today.

View attachment 3743121View attachment 3743122

Well, I was not too optimistic about using those couple of cupped planks, and I won't use them again for this type of project, but I was finally able to get it the point where it was usable. After all, I was building a compost bin and not a kitchen cupboard.

At the completion of this 4-tier stackable compost bin project, you would think that I had it all figured out. However, at the end of it all, I have even more thoughts on how to do it better next time! So, I might build another stackable compost bin and try a bunch of other ideas to see how they work out, or not.

Even though it's late at night, I'm still bouncing around ideas in my head to improve the build. But that's what I like about dealing with non-standard pallet wood. It makes me think how best to use the wood and what modifications to a "normal" wood project with standard lumber would be required to turn it into a good pallet wood design. If Dear Wife was not already in bed sleeping, I would be back out in the attached garage banging out a few more ideas that I want to try.

Best not to wake up Dear Wife...

I did a quick cost comparison of this project, and if I bought the cheapest pine board from our local big box store, it would have cost me about $55.00 for the lumber. I reused, recycled, repurposed pallet wood and made it for FREE. Of course, there is a little money spent on screws for this project, but I used a bucket of old rusty screws that I salvaged from another job. Seemed to work perfectly for the compost bin look. Later...

Can't wait to see it!

 

[ChicksnMore]

My Pallet Wood Modifications for Stackable Compost Bin Project

OK, I am pretty much done with my pallet wood stackable compost bin project. It was great fun taking the original design and using pallet wood to build this project. I'll have a number of comments on modifications needed if you use pallet wood, but first let me link you to the original article I got from the stackable compost bin on the Wildflower Yard website.

View attachment 3743776

If you are interested in building a stackable compost bin, I recommend you refer to the original article to see the full build design. What I will be discussing is the modifications I had to make using free pallet wood.

First of all, here is their supply list (2018)...

View attachment 3743777

I like them using picket fencing as it is much cheaper than even standard pine board. Of course, pallet wood is free so save yourself even more money.

And the cut list...

View attachment 3743778

Which you use to make something like this...

View attachment 3743779


My Pallet Wood Modifications: At first I did not understand why they did not make the compost bin tiers square - 3X3 feet. But now I see they are using dog ear picket fencing board which has a bit cut off on the top...

View attachment 3743782

That explains why one side was 36 inches and the other side was 34 inches. In any case, you can use whatever size you want for your build. Since I was using pallet wood, I decided to make my stackable compost bins 36 inches square.

I came up with this size based on the pallets I had to work with which were the standard 40 inches wide by 48 inches long...

View attachment 3743788

I used the circular saw method to cut off the top planks (deck boards) from the 2X4 stretcher (stringer). Then I pried up the boards in the middle and removed the nails. That left me with a usable board of about 38 inches in length. If you used the reciprocation saw method, and cut the boards off the 2X4 with a demolition blade, you could get the full 40 inch board. However, most of my pallets have checked and cracked ends so I end up cutting them off anyways. It's just faster using a circular saw and cutting them off at the start.

As to the pallet wood planks, they are not all the same size. Some are 3 inches wide, others maybe 4 inches, and I had a lot of boards that were 5-1/2 inches wide. When you look at the diagram of each tier, you can see that the first criteria are to match up the width of each board on each tier.

Next consideration is that pallet wood planks are not uniform thickness. My planks were anywhere from 1/2 inch thick, to 5/8 inch, to 3/4 inch. So, second criteria are to match the thickness of all the boards on the same tier.

Mind you, you can use different width and thickness boards on other tiers, but each tier has to be of the same size (width and thickness) planks. Well, let's agree to that for simplicity right now.

The advantage to building a stackable compost bin with uniform lumber is that it is very easy just to cut all the pieces the same length without any further thought. When dealing with pallet wood, and knowing that each tier might use a different thickness board, you have to re-think the whole concept of how they will stack. You cannot just measure the length of the boards all the same, put them together, and expect them to stack if you use different sized thickness boards on different tiers.

Pallet boards that are 3/4 inch thick will have a different inside dimension than pallet boards that 1/2 inch thick, and that little bit of difference will mess up the ability of the legs to slip into the tier below/above.

In my case using pallet wood of different thicknesses, I had to rethink the design concept so the inner dimensions (not the outside measurements) of each tier were 36X36 inches regardless of the thickness of the planks used.

I don't want to make it too complicated, but if you used 3/8 inch thick board on one tier, it would have an inside dimension of 35-1/4 inches. If you used 3/4 inch thick boards on the next tier, the inside dimensions would be 34-1/2 inches. That will not line up for a stackable design.

The modification for pallet wood use is that you cut the first 2 sides at your 36 inches, then you add the combined thickness of those boards and add it to the length of your other two boards. For example, if you used 1/2 inch thick planks, your would cut the first 2 boards at 36 inches, and the other 2 overlapping boards would be cut at 36+1/2+1/2= 37 inches.

If your next tier used 3/4 inch thick planks, you would start off cutting the first 2 boards at 36 inches, but the second pair of overlapping boards would have to be cut at 36+3/4+ 3/4 = 37-1/2 inches long.

Doing it that way keeps the inside dimensions of the stackable tier at exactly 36X36 inches regardless of the thickness of the planks used.

Next issue I found was that even though my inside dimensions were now all 36X36 inches, I found that the legs of one tier might still be a bit off when I stacked the tiers.

Take a look at this picture again...

View attachment 3743825

In theory, the legs should all fit perfectly into the other tiers. In reality, I found that the legs could still be off just enough that I would have to tap the legs in with a hammer. They were just too tight. To solve that problem, I added a slight slant to the legs maybe only 1/8 inch towards the center on the bottom of the leg. That fixed the problem of the legs being too tight and I no longer needed to use a hammer to tap them into place.

I built a nice jig for putting together the pieces, and it worked somewhat. But last night I thought of a new way to put the tiers together faster and easier without using the jig. So, I won't bother with showing a picture of that jig. I'm going to disassemble it anyway. I have an 18 gauge brad nailer and now use that to nail the board together, then I add the legs with a couple of shims to give the leg a slant, and then I just screw in the leg with the shims in place. I used a 1/8 inch thick piece of wood on the 2 sides of the boards to give each leg a slight slant towards the middle. That was enough to loosen up the design for each leg to easily slip into the tier below.

If you made it this far, here is a picture of my completed pallet wood stackable compost bin...

View attachment 3743853

For the legs, I just used whatever pieces I had available, it does not have to be 2X2 lumber...

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Notice how some legs are 2X2, some are 2X4 and others might be a cut off from a pallet stretcher. It really does not matter for the legs as long as they can stack on the leg below.

I don't know if you can see how I added a slight 1/8 inch slant to each leg towards the middle of each frame in this picture, but that was the trick to get the legs to more easily stack one into the tiers.

View attachment 3743857

I think I mentioned a long time ago that I liked the idea and design of this stackable compost bin. I had great fun building it with pallet wood, but if you just want a simple compost bin, nothing beats just 4 pallets tied together. The benefit of the stackable design is if you want to hot compost your material because you can take off each tier and restack them beside it, forking out the compost material as you turn over and rebuild the pile.

Any comments or suggestions most welcome. Later...

That looks great. Bet it'd make a good potato bed too. The kind where you add a tier as the plant grows and fill it with dirt.

 

[gtaus]

That looks great. Bet it'd make a good potato bed too. The kind where you add a tier as the plant grows and fill it with dirt.

Thanks. I love that idea! The pallet wood stackable compost bin could be used for many things, not just compost. Never thought about growing potatoes in it.

I don't know if I have talked about my composting in this thread, but most of my composting comes from my chicken run composting system. That provides me far more black gold compost than I can use every year. I love using the chickens to make compost.

Additionally, I have a 5-bin pallet compost bin setup under some trees in the backyard. Mainly, that is used only for stuff I don't want to feed to the chickens, like really moldy food, etc... Those pallet wood compost bins are fill and forget - no turning, no checking temperatures, nothing. It takes me a year or longer just to fill one bin with the material that I won't put in the chicken run. When I finally fill up that compost bin #5, then I harvest the compost in bin #1 and start all over again.

When I built the pallet wood stackable compost bin, it was more for learning how to make a stackable design, with pallet wood, where the wood is not all the same size. I don't intend to use those bins for composting.

Some of my ideas are to use one or two tiers to make small grazing frames for the chickens inside the chicken run. I just have to add a wire top lid of some kind and that project will be done. I have the idea to grow barley in one, oats in another, and maybe wheat in a third. I already have one large grazing frame in the chicken run planted with grass, and that works well, but I think it might be fun to have separate smaller grazing frames of different types of plants.

Another thought was to make smaller raised beds from those stackable compost bins for plants that I don't want to grow in my larger raised beds. I'm thinking of planting squash in one of those bins, and just letting the plant spread out all over the place. Last year I grew some squash in one of my larger raised beds and it took over all the space before it sprawled out into the yard. This year, I might just set up one of the stackable bins in a place by itself and let it grow wild. I have better use for my larger raised beds with plants that need more attention or have continual harvests throughout the summer (tomatoes, kale, Swiss chard, peppers, etc....)

I had not thought of using the stackable bins for growing potatoes, but that is a great idea. Actually, it seems like a perfect use for the stackable design.

 

[NanaK]

That looks great. Bet it'd make a good potato bed too. The kind where you add a tier as the plant grows and fill it with dirt.

That was my first thought! I've seen something similar online for growing potatoes.

 

[gtaus]

That looks great. Bet it'd make a good potato bed too. The kind where you add a tier as the plant grows and fill it with dirt.

That was my first thought! I've seen something similar online for growing potatoes.

I watched a number of YouTube videos last night on growing potatoes in a tower/stackable bins. Some people had good luck, others not so much. The point I took away from the videos is that the potato tower concept only works if have indeterminant potatoes. So, that is what I'm going to be looking into. If you plant determinant potatoes, you might as well plant them in the ground/mound the traditional way.

As to the potato tower concept itself, I found a good video from Doug and Stacy on YouTube and they made a simple tower out of 4 pallets wired together. Just like the classic pallet wood compost bin. They filled the base with material, added the potato starts, and topped them off with dirt. Then, as the potato plants grow, you cover them with more soil/straw.

Immediately, I saw the difficulty for some people to reach way down to the bottom of the compost bin to maintain the potato tower. It was a fixed height and reaching down 40 inches to the bottom might be a challenge for some of people of a certain age. Anyways, I thought the stackable compost bins I just build would be so much better for a potato tower because you would build up the tiers as needed and you would not have to bend over and reach down that 40 inches to cover the plants as they grew.

So, I took away two points that I thought were most important for me. First of all, you need to find indeterminant potatoes for the potato tower concept to work, and secondly, the stackable bin concepts would be much easier to maintain the plants.

Having said that, Dear Wife in a Filipina and, as expected, eats primarily rice. I doubt if we go through 10 lbs. of potatoes a year in our house. Still, I am talking to her to see if we should try some potatoes in a potato tower this year.

 

[NanaK]

We used to grow a lot of potatoes directly in the ground. All red skin determinate varieties. We mounded them at least 3 times over several weeks.

When they were close to getting ready, I would "steal" a few from each plant by carefully digging in at the bottom of the mound without disturbing the plant too much. These small newly dug taters are wonderful tasting, esp. with the first pickings of green beans.

I always thought it would be nice to have a tower type set up with a small trap door at the bottom of the stack. I've just never tried to grow them above ground so didn't know how well it would work.

I haven't grown potatoes in a few years because DH is diabetic and they are not the best food for him. He eats some now and then but not at all on a regular basis. There are only 2 of us now so most would be for me.

I'm considering growing a few this year in my garden. I need to decide because it's almost time to plant in my area.

When I saw the stackable bin, it reminded me of the "trap door" idea I had years ago. Even for determinate potatoes it would make them much easier to harvest. All that digging in the ground is a chore and sometimes you hit the taters with the shovel.

 

[fuzzi]

I watched a number of YouTube videos last night on growing potatoes in a tower/stackable bins. Some people had good luck, others not so much. The point I took away from the videos is that the potato tower concept only works if have indeterminant potatoes. So, that is what I'm going to be looking into. If you plant determinant potatoes, you might as well plant them in the ground/mound the traditional way.

As to the potato tower concept itself, I found a good video from Doug and Stacy on YouTube and they made a simple tower out of 4 pallets wired together. Just like the classic pallet wood compost bin. They filled the base with material, added the potato starts, and topped them off with dirt. Then, as the potato plants grow, you cover them with more soil/straw.

Immediately, I saw the difficulty for some people to reach way down to the bottom of the compost bin to maintain the potato tower. It was a fixed height and reaching down 40 inches to the bottom might be a challenge for some of people of a certain age. Anyways, I thought the stackable compost bins I just build would be so much better for a potato tower because you would build up the tiers as needed and you would not have to bend over and reach down that 40 inches to cover the plants as they grew.

So, I took away two points that I thought were most important for me. First of all, you need to find indeterminant potatoes for the potato tower concept to work, and secondly, the stackable bin concepts would be much easier to maintain the plants.

Having said that, Dear Wife in a Filipina and, as expected, eats primarily rice. I doubt if we go through 10 lbs. of potatoes a year in our house. Still, I am talking to her to see if we should try some potatoes in a potato tower this year.

Couldn't one side/pallet be removable, or short enough so a person could reach in more easily?

 

[gtaus]

When I saw the stackable bin, it reminded me of the "trap door" idea I had years ago. Even for determinate potatoes it would make them much easier to harvest. All that digging in the ground is a chore and sometimes you hit the taters with the shovel.

Couldn't one side/pallet be removable, or short enough so a person could reach in more easily?

I think you could certainly set up 3 full sized pallets and leave the front side open. That's what I did with my full sized pallets compost bins. Then I made a simple rail type system in the front where I slip in 2X6's as I fill up the compost bin. Works great.

Google picture of my type of full sized pallet compost bins...

Even back then I understood I did not want to have to reach over the pallet top and in to the bin to dig out the compost. If you used that same type of design for a potato tower, you can either add the boards in the front as you fill up the potato tower, either slipping the boards in like in my compost bin setup up, or you could screw the front boards on as needed and then simply unscrew the bottom board(s) to create that "trap" door opening mentioned.

Maybe something like this...

I think the advantage to using the stackable bins is that you would not be blocking out the sun with the tall pallet walls when you first start planting. You only would add another bin when needed and the plants would be exposed to full sun.

 

[gtaus]

I've been thinking about making some screen tops for my stackable compost bins. I mentioned that I think I might make some of them into grazing frames inside the chicken run. Also, I was thinking about maybe trying to grow some strawberries again this year after my failures of the past few years. My strawberries were ravaged by the birds and squirrels, and I never got a single strawberry last year.

Well, if I put a screen top on a stackable bin, it would keep out both the birds and the squirrels and maybe I would have a chance at harvesting a mature strawberry this year.

I was in town today checking out what was available in hardware cloth. I'm thinking the 1/2 X 1/2 inch hardware cloth would be good for both the grazing frame and strawberry cover ideas. Anybody got other ideas that work for them?