I love pallets. Because I see no point in buying new stuff for my garden projects when millions of single use pallets get thrown away every single day. Plus pallet wood oozes character and charm in my eyes. And recycling them is a result for the environment too. Oh, the price…don’t forget the price, yup, they are completely fabulously FREE! You can’t argue with that 🙂

One ‘small’ problem though. Even ‘single use’ pallets are tough to dismantle using normal tools (without breaking lots of planks!). So after being inspired by an instructable (thanks Darren), I decided to make a proper pallet breaker tool of my very own to make ‘wrecking’ pallets a breeze.

Then I discovered that using a pallet breaker doesn’t just make it easy to take pallets apart, it hugely increases the usable planks you save, because you’re much less likely to split or break planks. In fact you’ll be able to use over 90% of the wood using a pallet breaker, whereas using regular tools you’ll be lucky to save 60%. Did I mention that it’s quicker and easier too?!

Simple pallet breaker design (loosely speaking!)

Fortunately, I hoard bits of metal when I come across them and my old fireplace yielded some useful bits suitable for my pallet breaker. This means it only cost me a few welding rods to make it, result! This is what I managed to make from my scrap metal corner…

Rough measurements for this pallet breaker…

Don’t worry too much about the measurements, as most of them are not too critical. The important one is the distance between the tines, so make sure you adjust that to suit the type of pallet you have (check the bearer size and the width of the planks). The metal sizes are not set in stone either, so substitute them according to what you have to hand, just make sure they are sturdy enough to cope with some pretty hard levering (thick-walled stuff basically).

Buying stuff from the metal store?

If you’re going to buy some new steel, I’d go for mild steel 25mm (one inch) box section with minimum 3mm (1/8″) thick walls. You need thickish walls to take a really strong weld you see. Thin stuff will just tear out under load.

It’s really important the tines or forks fully support the plank when you lever them off because it’s really easy to split or break the plank. The easiest way to do this is to weld the tines underneath the back plate. Then the back plate sits on top of the pallet bearer and the top of the tines are snug under the planks. Like this…..

The length of the tines depends on your pallets but the ones above are 150mm (6”) long; although for most pallets, 112mm (4 1/2”) or so is sufficient.

So have a go with the materials you have to hand (because they are free!) and see how you go, you can always tweak the design once you’ve field tested it. My first pallet breaker was suitable for pallets with 47mm (2″) bearers but then I got some pallets that had 100mm (4″) wide cross planks, so I made another one with a wider jaw.

Now I know that many of you are not welders (neither am I, as you can see my welding is awful!) so I thought I’d put together a downloadable PDF that you can print out and take to your local machine shop to show them what you want. Most places will be able to build you a pallet breaker from their scrap bin and it’s not going to cost an arm and a leg. Especially if you tell them what you’re doing, pallet dismantlers of the world unite and all that 🙂 OR visit this instructable for a no-weld pallet breaker…

Download your FREE instructional PDF at the end of this sentence to make your very own pallet breaker!

Or, you can of course buy a pallet breaker off the shelf:

Roughneck pallet breaker at Amazon.co.uk

Vestil pallet breaker at Amazon.com

Various pallet breakers on ebay.co.uk

Vestil deluxe pallet breaker on ebay.com

Let me know if you find pallet breakers anywhere else and I can add them to this list. If you’re all out of ideas for making stuff out of old pallets, head on over to Wikipedia.org and check out their pallet crafts page.

Don’t forget to support once in a while…

Happy pallet breaking!

Stay well

Ian

p.s. please excuse the ‘basic’ nature of the video, you won’t see me in it, as I have a face made for radio…. 🙂

BUT it does show the first mighty pallet breaker I made in action…..

All round handy bloke, a one time humanitarian, and mad scribbler. Moved around a bit, from one side of the planet to the other, but now settled close to the beach in Norway.