Build Something From Nothing
Are you an absolute beginner? In this video, you can see a great little project to start with and exercise your skills. You don’t even have to go out and buy wood. You can make this from an old pallet you can find in your backyard.
A couple of pointers for the beginning woodworker:
Pallets are typically built from southern hardwoods like red and white oak, hickory, hemlock and locust. These woods are great for pallets because they are incredibly strong, dense and weather resistant. These properties are not so great for working with hand tools, however. All of the above woods can have unpredictable, wavy grain that can make planing rather difficult. They also are known to have high amounts of silica (sand) embedded in the wood fibers. This is especially common in hardwoods that grow in sandy lowlands called hammocks. If you plane a piece of white oak and then hold it into the light at an angle, you will often see tiny sparkles on the surface. These are from the bits of silica in the wood. It acts almost like super fine sandpaper to dull your plane and chisel irons.
There is a huge surge in interest in re-purposing old pallets thanks to HDTV, Instagram and Pinterest. Pallet wood does have some appeal in that it is affordable and has plenty of patina and character. It is important to remember to thoroughly disassemble the pallet and clean every surface of each piece of wood. You will often find nails or other small bits of metal embedded in the wood. Large amounts of gravel and sand often find their way into the surface as well. Use a good wire brush to scrape both with and against the grain to loosen the foreign materials. Using a small metal detector or stud finder is highly advisable. The last thing you want is to have that free piece of hardwood ruin your $150 tenon saw.
One of the benefits of using pallet wood is the acquired patina. If you are going to fully resurface each piece of wood you will lose that patina. You can still create a solid piece of furniture as long as the surfaces that will be joined together are square. This was common when timber framers built homes from locally-harvested timbers. The timbers were rarely ever flat and smooth and often had some bow and twist. The joiners worked around this by only squaring the timbers at the joints. The same process works when making a box or table or most other types of furniture that rely on right angle joints. The outside, weathered faces can be kept intact and only the concealed joints will have to be milled square.
