g'day my name is mark and i do not have
thirty thousand dollars worth of tools i work with recycled timber and i mostly use
pallet i use lots and lots and lots of pallets i'm over here one day i decided i wanted to give
woodworking a bit of a go i was about five years ago i decided i'll go find some pallets i'll pull
them apart and i'll see if i actually like this the reason i use pallets is because they are free
and they're literally laying around everywhere so free i think is the most accessible type of
timber to get in and have a go all i had in this shed was a couple of basic power tools couple of
ryobi's 20 years old so i kicked it off with a pry bar and a mallet and went to work pulling apart
pallets pulling apart pallets is time consuming getting all the nails out if you're approaching
this as a hobby or thinking about a side hustle if you're happy to put in the time to learn
with pallets and not expect to get that time back in profit initially palettes are the way to
get as a thumbnail suggests i want to give you my back story um and how i built up this shed let's
go back five years i decided i'm just gonna try and build a basic workbench that'll let me know
if i sort of like this before i start spending any money obviously working with pallet wood there
is only so much you can do with the stock that you get a lot of thin strip pilings and some thicker
stretches straight if you're lucky now because i wanted to build a chunky workbench i'm going to
need to join all this timber together somehow to make up a nice chunky beam i de-nailed hand-planed
off some of the timber glued it together with very ordinary pva glue clamped it up and then i planed
off that side and then fell in love with pallet wood side grain furniture my very early builds i
thought i'm gonna i'm gonna make a basic coffee table learn a few things when i finished this
coffee table i decided someone might wanna buy that i threw that thing on facebook marketplace
for 90 dollars and it sold in the first hour i better build something else went through
that same routine again roughly cleaning up the timber gluing it together flattening it off
with a electric hand plane to come up with those sort of unique pallet wood slabs i then knocked
up a hallway table this again i threw that one on marketplace 120 bucks i had about 20 people send
me a message is this still available yes it is and then 19 uh no sorry it's not so what i then
did was i made two more hallway tables i then messaged all those people who were interested
i sold those two tables again for just 120 i then messaged the rest of the people and
said i'm happy to make these this is a hobby it will take me some time if you'd like one let
me know and we went from there so i started making lots of hallway tables i slowly increased the
price it was starting to feel like i was working a lot for not much money but at the time that was
fine i was learning woodworking and i was making cash which i could then buy the next thing to help
me make that table a little bit more efficient now why hallway tables it's that one piece of
furniture that doesn't have to be structurally amazing it is literally going to sit there at the
end of the hallway or somewhere else in the house it'll have a few ornaments photo frames that sort
of stuff people just want something to fill the space these hallway table occasional tables were
very very popular so from there i started to treat this thing more like a side hustle i was very
much selling cheap furniture new to woodworking still learning trying to get better on each table
each time i'd make something i'd sell something i would save the cash i'd spend some of it
on whatever save the cash buy a new tool start to make things easier for me in the shed
for almost pumping as many of these things out i definitely don't have thirty thousand
dollars worth of tools i've now built up a decent selection of good tools that helped
me get the job done i was about 80 pieces of furniture in before i bought the thicknesser
so all of those slabs i would hand flatten with a router and a basic sled that i knocked
up out of pallets and it let me use those slabs sand them off clean them up stick them into the
piece of furniture sell them go again working with pallets one of the biggest issues when you don't
have many tools is getting things square hence the slogan early on i had a lot of shockers most
stuff i did was eyeball square the timber that is um looking down and thinking that piece is
probably going to be okay to make some framework all the other stuff that went into the
slabs that didn't matter it was going to be clamped together and cleaned off so the
clamps would sort out all those wonky donkeys making all that furniture going through literally
hundreds of pallets i pretty much knew early on i need to save up first to get a table saw table
saw was going to be the most versatile piece of kit and allow me to rip and resaw as much
of this timber in the shortest amount of time again because all this pallet wood is always wonky
as a donkey you then need to start making yourself some jigs so you've got yourself a straight edge
so you can start putting your first straight edge on your pallet slats there's a million ways you
can do that these are just a couple of my my sleds that i've had over the years if you do stick
around till the end of the video i'm just going to tack on a very simple jig i don't actually have
one yet i'm going to make it out of these pallets this jig will get you started without a table saw
without a thickness up it'll at least let you get your first straight edge you can start gluing
pallets together cleaning them off and getting into the game so the plan for all this pallet wood
for the next few videos will be to start to do another few big projects and i want to show
as much as i can again now and hopefully with some more skills and knowledge to pass on of the
six palettes i've got here this is the only pine palette probably the biggest comment i've got over
the years i can only find pine pellets the simple answer is you just need to keep driving past
now i don't have a magical stockpile of pallets during my peak of picking up hundreds
of pallets i would literally drive past two bunnings nearly every day on the way to
work and just have a quick look through the pile and start the hand select anything that had nice
color don't discount these pines pellets look at the thickness of these there's some 25 mil thick
slats and some very big stretches i use this stuff heaps especially to make up basic frames and legs
for those hallway tables this stuff will still clean up nicely but what you can also do is clean
it up and paint it save the feature for the top or whatever you want to do the other great thing
about time is it is not rough on your tools it's easy to cut it's easy to clean up you're not going
to go through blades there's thousands of these things lying around if you make an error you just
go and get another one everyone's favorite part banging out nails we're going to save these do you
want to know the easiest way to get the nails out should we give him the gun so this is what my first slabs look like this
would be the underside as you can see all the different widths of timber and then we'd have the
good side this is the side that i would flatten off with the router now initially all i had was
a heap of cheap and nasty little f-clamps i could only clamp together about four or five slats of
pallet wood i would clean those off i'll then join them together before i even have a router slip
that was very much the hard way i would hand plane off that first edge to get my very first piece of
timber so to get in the game of flattening find yourself a piece of scrap board find yourself a
pine pallet and try and get two perfectly straight pieces screw those on and you've got yourself
your base frame for your router sleeve i made a few of these um router sleds initially
but what i found is just getting some angled steel keeps this profile as low as possible
you'll probably find that getting the depth you need to get through some of those uneven surfaces
will be one of those stumbling blocks so reducing that thickness there rather than a thick piece
of ply uh you can save yourself a little bit of depth this angle steel is very cheap from a steel
store and very easy to make i did a lot of hours with this thing my advice there are thousands
of paths lying around there is not thousands of nice colored timber pellets flying around doing
it this way will get you started however we can double our stock from this pole here you should
be able to get two slats out of each pallet board maybe even three depending on how thick you're
going to go so i would suggest making the jig that i'm going to put together at the end of this video
start ripping every beautiful piece of pallet wood into two w stock save falling apart an extra
couple hundred pounds when i got started i did not do much to the pallet wood at all if it was a
little bit rough i would just hit it with the belt sander just to clean it up a little bit i would
then just rely on lots of glue and i would clamp the life out of it yeah i knew the pva glue wasn't
that great and i knew my gluing surfaces and bonds were not that great either however i would not
rely on this gluing as any sort of structural this was all about making a big chunk of wood
making it look cool with all the beautiful colours however i would build the structure into the
project some other way to support the slab okay so from here i've got six pallets busted apart i'm
gonna put a straight edge on every single piece i'm going to use my straightening jigs that work
with the table saw and then going to clean all the timber up i now use a thicknesser and every every
piece goes through the thicknesser both sides i get a beautifully planed surface a beautiful
gluing surface check this out although i've just mocked this up for the thumbnail this looks very
much like day one gluing palettes together i had old broken clamps ratchet straps pretty much
two dollar f clamps from the cheapy store and craft pva glue pissing out everywhere that helps
you get you started that helps you sell your first piece of furniture make some cash start to upgrade
do things a little bit smarter a little bit better with some better quality stuff so in essence
this is what this video is all about just get started get addicted you'll love it you'll
make some cash you can build your little workshop build your little side hustle and the pacer itself
so good for the brain so good for the inside alrighty quick channel shout out to jesper makes
now jesper mentioned me in one of his videos video went bananas lots of people came over subscribed
to me thank you very much so i just want to return the favor to you so go find his video where the
thumbnail looks a little something like this check it out 1.5 million people can't be wrong so
stick with me we'll do a little sped up montage check out all this cool color all these palette
slats are now 40 millimeters wide i've got color variation i've got thickness variation i've got
reasonably usable timber clamp those together you've got yourself a nice beautiful slab top
this is as far as i'm going to take this tip but in this video the next series of videos is going
to be using all of this timber to start to make some furniture and other bits and pieces so if
you want to stay tuned see what i do with this please subscribe like this video help it get going
um but the biggest thing you can do to help me out is actually watch the video it is the number
one thing that helps any channel grow so uh thank you very much for watching thanks very
much everyone has been with me from the start so hopefully you'll get some tips out of
this but the biggest message i've got is just get started it is so much fun and these
will pay for your workshop in no time at all okay
