At home I quickly assembled the saw in the garage, and it works beautifully. I recyled as much of the packaging as possible, but there was the question about what to do with the pallet. I suppose I could have returned it, or broken it up into pieces and added it to my firewood pile. Without much thought I just leaned it up against the fence to be dealt with later. The pallet sat for a few weeks, and finally I needed to dispose/recycle it. Then in my head a few neurons fired, bzzzz, bzzz, and an image materialized:
Why not? No reason not to try. Some of the wood looks okay, maybe with a little tender love and care... With all the discussion about different woods used in skis/snowboards on our very own forum, as well as on TTips.com and others, it seemed like a good idea to experience first hand if it "wood" make much of a difference. G-man is playing with pine, others have tried fir, poplar, and of course, the famous maple. I've recently gravitated toward wood with knots.
Enter the Project Pallet.
Keep in mind that the pallet has an interesting history, for example, read this entry from WikiPedia and also this little note. My favorite lines from WikiPedia are:
"The cheapest pallets are made of softwood and are often considered as expendable, to be discarded as trash, along with other wrapping elements, upon reaching destination. These pallets are of a very simple construction which permits lifting from one of two opposite positions only. Slightly more complex hardwood pallets and most plastic pallets and metal pallets can be lifted from all four sides."
The pallet I have is the slightly more complex hardwood version because it can be lifted using forklift prongs from four sides. But there's visual evidence that at one point in its life, parts of it broke off and someone patched it up with parts from another, lower-quality pallet. I'm not a wood expert so I cannot confirm 100% the exact species, but it appears to be a mix of pine, cedar, and maybe maple..?
Now making a pair skis using pallet wood isn't a completely crazy idea. In fact, people have recycled pallets to create some very useful structures -- take for instance this nice shed. Oh, the dog house at the bottom of that page is unique -- kudos to the inventor!
If you still think I'm crazy, then let me ease your mind by saying I'm doing my part by recycling, and also through this experience it'll add to the body of knowledge in terms of what "wood" one should use or not use for skis/snowboards.
. Somebody has to do it...Let's get started. First thing I did was take a hammer and pry bar and separated enough pieces to create core blanks. It was a more difficult task than expected. The nails that fasten the pieces together are specially designed to stay put (screw-like). Some of the pieces were severely split, and using the hammer and pry bar didn't help matters. I got enough pieces to work with in about 40 minutes -- oh, it looks like one standard size pallet has enough material for two pairs of skis. The next step was to run the pieces through the planer. I had to make sure that all the nails were out -- some pieces had bits of old nails embedded within, so I had to comb over the wood very carefully. Here's what the planks looked like after I cleaned them up:
Every plank was split to some degree. I did my best to rip them into 1.5" strips. Since the longest piece was 3-feet, I had to creatively stitch the pieces together to form a core blank that was 6-feet long. The trick was to distribute the areas of discontinuity when the pieces were glued together -- not too bad:
After the glue dried, I planed the blank on both sides, then split lengthwise to create two symmetric core blanks, 12mm thick. Here's what they look like after the planer:
The Project Pallet skis will sport the same shape as the Kaweah. I will add rubber for damping and also some metal. I expect the skis to be done by mid-May because I have a backcountry trip planned to "break" them in....
Stay tuned for more...
.
