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I love building things from pallets. With a a little understanding and sympathy for the materials, a careful woodworker can transform essentially scrap wood into objects of true beauty and utility. I've even seen strip-built kayaks made from the free pallets that you can find behind any shipping department. By carefully selecting and cutting the strips from the cracked and rotting boards, then planing and sanding, it's possible to make strips that look as good as any of the expensive marine grade woods.
Today, though, we move into a new era. With CLC's Transit Platforms the quality of the wood is so good that it isn't just for strippers anymore. In fact, with one of those I can finally achieve my ultimate recycling goal - wood strip toilet tissue.
By using very high quality wood and a razor-sharp blade in my plane, I get paper-thin shavings that can be used for making squares of tissue. Rather than assembling them on a frame as with other strippers, I weave the strips into squares. This has 3 advantages. First, the crossed strips naturally form a 2-ply product. Second, the crossed grains give the product extra strength in an application where you really, really don't want random tears. Finally, by arranging the strips so that the direction of the curls oppose each other, the product wants to stay together - without glue!
The obstacle in the past to recycling pallets into wood strip toilet tissue has been the low quality of the wood. No one wants a splinter you-know-where.
The CLC Transit Platorms, with their high-quality wood, fix this problem. The wood is so good that you can cut long curly shavings with a good hand plane. The yellow Alaska cedar boards also have a pleasant natural smell that is a robust perfume in the room where it's needed most. You only need one strip per square for a pleasant, fresh-smelling experience. The rich dark brown mahogany boards, well, you know.
So I am really looking forward to the CLC transport platforms being available, especially for free out behind shipping departments.
Laszlo
2 replies:
RE: Recycling pallets
Brilliant!
And that weave pattern makes me think of fiberglass, which brought about an epiphany: What if all those sad individuals with GRP and other plastic boats could elevate their status to become owners of wooden yachts by laminating this cedar/mahogany weave to the outside of their gelcoats, topped off by a dozen coats or so of varnish? It's simply the inverse of us laying woven glass upon our okoume craft. Then they too could experience the lustful envy that we true wooden boat owners encounter on a daily basis, not to mention the joys of constant brightwork.
Perhaps this is a subject to be further pursued a year from yesterday.
RE: Recycling pallets
» Submitted by Dan Thaler - Mon, 4/1/24 » 4:55 PM
Laszlo,
If you weave them on the bias you'll get more bang for your butt.