bam! mr. tarrou. so my wife and i are on aleisurely drive one day and she starts yelling stop the car stop the car. she's doing whatshe always does looking on the side of the road for discarded items. and this time sheactually found something that can be a great addition to our backyard because we alreadyhave a bench very similar to this. someone took this cast iron bench that had a bunchof rotted wood on it and apparently they have tried to remove some of the wood and got somerust on bolts. they didn't know what to do with it so they threw it away. so we are goingto do one of our favorite projects which to take a pallet and upcycle it to be an awesomebench. now this is a bench that was already in our backyard. it is been in our backyardfor a very long time. it's would have brought
it out. so we just got done rebuilding thisbench that we had using pallet wood. we thought this was a perfect time to share this perfecttime to share this latest project with you. now the first part of your project is to makesure that when you paint the ends of your bench they don't start shipping immediately.so you're going to have to make sure you prep them. get all of the rust off. scrape allthe chipping paint off. to do that you're going to want a wire brush at the end of adrill would be nice. you can have a hand wire brush and some paint scrapers. work on gettingrid of all of the old paint and rust that you can so that your paint job last as longas possible. now for getting these bolts off of this bench you can use a hacksaw or i havegot an inexpensive reciprocating saw. you
are also going to want a dust mask and a setof safety goggles. okay a couple of tips here. we are out to cut this or one of these boltsoff so i can start sanding and wire brushing this metal work off. my wife came up withthis idea of at the end of your extension cord get a power strip so you can plug inyour... i have a plug for my reciprocating saw plug for my camera and a plug for my drill.this way you don't have to keep plugging and unplugging your tools as you work. that ishow easy it can be to cut off all of these bolts. so look in the sales and if you doa lot of projects get yourself one of these inexpensive reciprocating saw. it is alsogoing to come in very handy when you start taking apart that pallet. so i have the twoends of our bench cleaned off. one is same
here. this way we can paint both sides ofit and not worry about pain in one side and then letting it dry and flipping it and paintingthe other side. it goes a lot quicker when it's hanging. and a lot of times when doingthese metal projects of painting metal i use enamel paint and brush it on. and becausei'm going to use some spray-on paint. when you use your spray paint make sure that youuse the can about 6 to 12 inches from the surface. go and sweeping motions. everytimeyou go to make a pass start and stop the paint. you don't want to just hit the trigger andstart moving it all over the place. eventually your hands going to stop and wherever yourhand stops you're going to get too much paint there and it will start to drip. i don't knowif i mentioned this or not but as you are
why are brushing the surface not only areyou trying to get the old paint off but the paint does not come off you were going torough up the surface to get a better bond with the new paint. okay so we got a firstcoat on. you're certainly going to need to put on a couple of coats. with all of thisnetwork and all this intricacy you're going to think that you're done pulled us down andsee that you missed another spot. so it'll take another couple of tries to make surethat you get this completely covered without any runs. know about these pallets. you canfind these pallets... big box stores like your home depot publix or walmart they werereuse their pallets. they send them back and you cannot get pallets from them. but yougo around your neighborhood and look for your
small businesses maybe a carpet store andlook behind there and ask if they have any pallets that they are willing to give up.that is how we find these pallets. we just go around and find small businesses that don'thave a system of constantly reusing them. however pallets are made to be strong andto be reused in most cases. so when you do these pallet projects you're going to wantto have at a minimum a hammer and a crowbar to pull these apart. they do not just simplyyou know you just look at them and they start coming apart. they are actually quite difficult.they can actually be also quite frustrating. that is because when you're using a hammera crowbar to pry these apart because the nails are often those twisted type nails that donot want to go out of wood... you will start
splintering the boards up that you might havewanted to use. it can ruin your project or require you to get another pallet question.ask me how i know. now we've discovered another use for the reciprocating saw. this is actuallythe reason i thought a reciprocating saw and the first place. you just get yourself aninexpensive reciprocating saw... and manage to put your dust mask on top of your eyeballs.nothing. get yourself a metal blade or wood blade. the wood blade, will work but theywill get eaten up pretty quickly. this is a metal blade on a reciprocating saw and startslipping it between the support and the top board that you want to use. eventually youwill cut that tree and you will have a undamaged board. maybe some pieces of metal in therebut you can work around those at least i found.
that is it. i am just going to repeat thisprocess through all of the connection points and get these top boards. this is going tobe the seating surface of a new bench. by the way i didn't realize this when i startedworking with pallets but there are chemically treated pallets to keep the since they'reoutdoors to keep the bugs from chewing them up. and there are heat treated pallets. youcan find that stamp right over here. no i'm not going to pretend to know everything thatgoes on into treating palace so that they can survive outdoors and be reused over andover again. but i do know now that if you find this ht stamp that means that it is goingto be a much safer ballot for you to be around and working with. a lot less dangerous thanthose nasty chemicals that they use in the
chemically treated pallets. alright so wehave used our reciprocating saw to free the upper slopes of the palate like i showed you.we are going to need 10 boards which are two and three quarter inches wide. also make sureas you are scavenging for pallets that you get some boards that are thick enough to supportthe weight of a couple people as they sit on the bench. i got really lucky on the previousbench that i showed you but not so much on this one. the wood is very nice but i needthis to be two and three quarter inches wide and they came off the old pilot that we founddoes that size. but in this case we have to cut them down. this would go a lot quickerwith a table saw but i don't have one. i've got a couple of sources a circular saw andwe're going to do the best we can here. i
usually have a helper but she's not here rightnow. so i am going to do the best i can working this out. we are going to use this first boardthat we've already made and use it as a template. draw a pencil line. make sure that this isunplugged or turned off. okay with no power... your circular song is going to... let's getthe power strip around here... your power says of course have an adjustment for depth.it is usually back here on the side. you can pull this up in this case and i just how deepwe are going to cut. now again i'm here alone in this particular case and doing this alone.again there was no power and i'm going to set the depth of the saw just so that it barelytouches 2 x 4 support that we have underneath. lock it down. that way i can run this alongthe board pretty much until i hit the clamp
i have out here at the end holding the boardin its place. i don't have to worry about tearing up my saw horses. probably not a goodhabit but i'm going to just let my glasses protect my eyes. i have ruined my safety gogglesrecently actually earlier in the day. i should get a new pair but for right now let's goahead and get started. now we are only building a bench here. it is not like we're doing finecarpentry. i have measured this line so that it is two and three quarter inches wide. i'mgoing to run the blade just to the right of that line. okay so we just have to repeatthat eight or nine more times and we will have our boards and move on to our next stageof building this bench. so now i've got my love and boards cut. the next thing to doto make this work bench comfortable to sit
on. of course we're going to have the samethese boards. but just because i have this nice $7.50 router that i got at a yard saleprobably about 20 years ago and is still holding strong i have got a 1 quarter round bit onthe end of this router. i'm going to on the top of the boards which is going to be theseating surface i'm going to hit the corners of these boards so that they are nice androunded off. so i'm just going to repeat that to all of these boards. it is really niceif you have a helper. i am not sure why i had the sawhorses set so low that i have tosquat but any rate. i am using a clamp on one side of this to keep the board from movingaround too much as i round off the edges. but you don't need to see me about the edgeswhat would that be 22 corners. let's finish
this and move on to the next step. so we haveour 10 boards cut each at two and three quarter inches wide. by the way i don't think i evertold you all along this was. it will vary by pallet. the length of these boards willdetermine the width of your bench. these are 44 inches 444 & 1 quarter inches long. i needto actually i'm not finished this yet. i took one of these two and three quarter inch boardsand cut it in half. that is going to be for the very top of the bench. if you don't havea router and you found one like i did at a yard sale super cheap and you don't want tobuy a router you can take your palm sander run it along the edge the sharp edge... becauseyou don't want these to cut into your leg... and just run the sander back and forth withsome 80 grit sandpaper. just keep rocking
that back and forth along the length and youwill get a little bit of a rounded edge on these boards so that they won't be uncomfortable.now hopefully you can see this on the camera but as you look at these four bolts that goup the signs of our bench they are not all dead center in these boards. when i startedto reassemble this bench i started pre-drilling all of the holes and within the second boardrealized that there was going to be a problem. the holes that are drilled into or that areformed into the sides of the stage or not all perfectly aligned. so you want to andyou will see me do this... we are going to set up some measurements in pre drill a coupleof holes and install one of these boards. it will very loosely hold the sides with benchtogether. then i use some spacers in between
these boards. it was one quarter and one nutthat i used at the back of these bolts to space out the boards and make them even. ithen just drill the holes wherever they needed to be. if one of the bolts was a little highor or right in the middle or a little low... i don't really love that but at least my boardsare evenly spaced out. so make sure that you do not pre-drill all of the holes unless youlook at the bench pieces that you have and they're good everything is straight and even.okay well we are looking at this close view and planning for this first board too looselyhold the two sides or bench together i am looking at the i am actually not have a skinnyboard at the front of this bench. i'm looking at the second hole and looking at 1,2,3,4,5…if you are counting the first hole that you
we are going to skip it would be the 6th hole.i want to have this 6 hole centered on our wood slat as much as possible. you want thewood slots there's a little bit of a lip in here, hopefully you can see that in the camera,it kind of slipped underneath the slip. not touching the side of the metal bench becauseagain you don't want to hold any moisture and have this wood rot prematurely. so i amaiming to pre-drill at least for this first board to have it talk in just a little bitunderneath that ledge and threw back here dead we will put a a couple of one quarterinch holes. i am using stainless steel bolts. that is where you want to splurge by the wayis with your hardware. get some stainless steel bolts and nuts. later on if you wantto redo this project you will be able to disassemble
the bench without any problems and not haveto cut the bolts out. we are looking at if i can't get in the way of the camera we aregoing to bring these holes in from the side of the board one inch dead center. just showingyou i don't want to make this video too long by talking too much but we are again 1 inchin just because that happens to be where the hole was in this bench. yours might be different.because i was cutting two and three quarter inch and have we are looking basically 1 3/8it from the side of the board. 1234 5th hole. here's our board with the hole in it. theseare one quarter of an inch diameter bolt going into a quarter inch hole. when i was makingmy previous bench i had to use a hammer and lightly tap that through. you do not wantto countersink these bolts either because
that will collect water and cause the woodsrot. so we will slip that through the hole come with our notes underneath. hand tightenit. use a screwdriver. you cannot see this in the camera because i want to get you anup-close view of this. but now my arm is blocking it. come underneath with a wrench and theylock it. this one happens to be a 7/16 socket. now tighten that up. unless you have somehelp this will be this first word is going to be quite clumsy. i'm going to turn thescrew here and use the socket to keep the nut still. there we go and we'll just nudgethis in. you want to have a little bit of play with this because you are going to workon the square this up your bench as we go. okay now working by yourself this will bewith two people... it'll be a little bit of
a balancing act but i'm going to bring thisout a little bit. grab the second side of the bench. and with this particular benchthe other reason why i am skipping the first hole is because on this side it is brokenoff. you can get a little strip of metal in here and give yourself that one extra hourto put the skinny piece of wood in the front but i'm just going to leave it there. it wascomfortable on the other bench without it. so one, two, three, four and 5. there we go.this through. try and get to go to the hole. or take it out and try again. now we foundthese ends for this bench. you saw it i used pallet wood for the wood slats. so far weare looking at pretty much just free materials. i would strongly suggest that you do not skipagain on that hardware. because i have done
this before like i said earlier we did inthe past. and every bolt & nut that was stainless steel came right off and everything that wasnot had to be cut. ok now the goal as we put this together, and be seen in the camera,is to make sure that everything is straight. so let me get some nuts that are going tothe back of these bolts some quarters to use as spacers and what i will do now that thisis together is i will keep measuring the distance is. right now we're looking at about 45 incheswide at the top and well 45 at the bottom. so we'll just make sure that these arms don'tgo out or go into much and then everything stays relatively straight as we go. here'swhat i was talking about. you can see the quarter and the nuts space in between eachof these boards. i have made sure, re-measured
i think i misspoke earlier, the distance betweenthe top of this ledge the lip is the other side is 44 â¼. you can see the boards arevery evenly spaced. i've got this about as perpendicular as i can the wood to metal soeverything is nice and even. so now with everything very precariously balanced here let's seeif we can't do this right the first time without getting anything bumped and moved around.i'm going to take this drill again with a one-quarter inch dick and come up throughthe bottom and hold these boards with my hand. i will drill those holes and make sure everytime i come up and look to make sure that none of these spacers have gotten moved. actuallyi just thought about this. why not put in the bolts as we go and keep everything fromshifting. i'm trying to think of some issues
that i had while i was making the first bench.one of them was when i was doing this was that one of the spacers fell out and so iput a hole in the wrong spot. i have not had it yet i got really close on this one therewas always that issue as you are using salvaged wood i did not cut the board's shorter sothat we got completely rid of all of the nails. i just figured we would work around them.i stopped checking didn’t i. so you can see this last part goes pretty quickly. youwill see when we are done with this that a couple of these holes are nowhere near thecenter of these boards and some of them are. i know the boards are evenly spaced. double-checkingthis one more time we have one more time the front 44 and an eighth in the distance atthe top between these is again 44 1/8. with
the bottom all tightened up almost completelytightened down i have been sitting here pushing and pulling these out trying to get this assquare as i can. these are not perfect and of course trying to keep the uprights as perpendicularor squares possible. so let's get the backboards. so we are ready to put our back on. if i wantto cleanest hole, i really should not be drilling towards the front surface of these boards.but the way that i am doing this it just seemed like the quickest way with these holes beingin the irregular places to drill it this way. i'm going to let the top of the bolt headscover up any splintering that we have as we drill our holes. now just to make sure thesethings don't move around any more than they need to or want to. we slip our bolts andtheir and do the other side. yeah you might
want to make sure that you do not drill throughyour hand. okay so all i have to do is put some more bolton put the nuts on and i'vegot one more piece on the top and we're done. now if you get a complete set. if you findone of these broken-down vendors with all of the parts and you took the way you willhave a couple of support ben's here to keep it from going out of plumb a vertical, rockingside to side. there's a metal strip that goes up the middle of these boards to tie themall together to make the whole bench a little bit stronger. so i said we were done withthat last board but i was feeling just a little bit. all we have to do now again with somestainless steel screws so they don't rust out over the years, i'm just going to startputting these supports in. this little piece
is going to be fairly hard to bend. so youmight want to rough in the shape before you start doing this. i used another bench inthe background as leverage to get this to bend into the shape that i need it in. sonow all i have to do is put a screw through all these holes and then we will be done.m there you go. i totally awesome bench out of pretty much up-cycled material. we reusethe metal pieces got a pallet i did spring for some very nice stainless steel hardwarethat really pays off in years to come if you are to ever redo this. but you could not usestainless steel hardware. i use a drill and a one-quarter inch drill bit. we used a routerand a 90-degree rounded router bit. that is optional. you can do the same thing or getmore comfortable effects with just a palm
sander. i used 80 grit sandpaper 200 gritsandpaper a circular saw of some sort and yeah. that is pretty much it. the bolts were1 1/2 inches long and quarter inch in diameter. so of course we have some machine bolts ornuts to go along with the bolts. those stainless steel screws that you saw me using or threequarter inch stainless steel screws. that is pretty much it. i've got a bench that willlast years to come. it is very comfortable. and it costs next to nothing. i am mr. tarrou.bam! go do a home project!