Recycling Materials for Shed Builds

**Bushmiller** · 24th August 2022, 12:16 PM

Well, the title of this thread pretty much sumed things up, but I posted the thread because the price of the raw materials has escalated so much. It came home to roost just recently. My sister, who lives on a rural block down in NSW, had purchased a number ( about ten or so) garden sheds. Most were secondhand and she planed on using them for a variety of puposes ranging from a feed store to a tool shed. Unfortunately, despite thinking she had stored them satisfactorily in their dismantled state, a freak wind storm shattered that illusion and spread the panels around the paddocks!

This type of garden shed (I used to call them lawn lockers, but it seems they have been upgraded to garden shed, without any change in construction

) with the flimsy channel fixing and shallow panel profile did not survive well. I suggested that we build some timber frames and attached the salvaged metal sheeting to these frames. Sounded like a good proposition and sister jumped at the opportunity. I then looked into the cost of timber from a local Cypress Pine timber mill and was immediately horrified. The timber for, say, a 3m x 3m shed was going to be about $500 and that did not include roofing timber.

Back to the drawing board and conferred with the responsible people at my workplace to see if I could salvage some materials from our scrap yard. To cut a very long story down to just a long story, they said yes and we came to an arrangement.

There were two main piles of timber in which I was interested. The first pile was quite straight forward:

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The second pile was more daunting and no I did not use all this. In fact I reclaimed about a third of only the pallet in the foreground. They are quite large being 12m long and 3.3m wide. They are made as if a floor and comprisebearers, joists and floor boards. However, everything is big; very big! The bearers and joists were composite timbers nailed together. The joists were two 150mm x 38mm nailed together for the middle joist and three nailed together for the outside joist as you can see in the second pic below. The bearers were two 200mm x 70mm nailed together with additional packing pieces on the sides ( I have some pix later on in the thread). These were really nailed together with primarily five inch nails!

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I brought the timber home in largish sections and gradually worked away at de-nailing it. I know some will not be terribly interested in the process and for you and the impatient, this is the result. There are no stickers and the spacers are merely to stablise the stack.

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The water tank behind the timber stack gives some idea of size but it is a squat tank so the stack is a around 1500mm high. The plan is to resaw the timber to 75mm x 38mm which is plenty large enough for a traditional frame with these small garden style sheds. The loose pieces on the top were just random dunnage to give a little bit of weight to straighten some of the pieces that had curvature. If that doesn't work they will be used for smaller components such as nogging where the gentle curve will be of no importance.

I will post some more detail of the breaking down process later on for those who have nothing better to read.

After I have done that, I will pose the inevitable question of whether it is all worthwhile. I should have mentioned that the timber is all pine. It will have to have some treatment to prevent insect attack.

Regards
Paul

**Bushmiller** · 24th August 2022, 04:00 PM

Perhaps I should have mentioned the purpose of the large (bigger than a standard semi-trailer) "pallets". They originally carried tube banks for our new reheater in the boilers at work. Each section weighed 29 tonnes.

Regards
Paul

**Chris Parks** · 24th August 2022, 04:21 PM

My dad and myself built a house frame out of recycled Oregon about 65 years ago and it is still standing. Many hours of de-nailing and re-sawing etc to make it but the price was right. People as a rule simply don't think that way any longer, did the snakes object when you took their perfectly good home away.

**Bushmiller** · 24th August 2022, 05:14 PM

Originally Posted by Chris Parks

My dad and myself built a house frame out of recycled Oregon about 65 years ago and it is still standing. Many hours of de-nailing and re-sawing etc to make it but the price was right. People as a rule simply don't think that way any longer. Did the snakes object when you took their perfectly good home away.

Chris

It is good to know I am not completely alone in this type of endeavour even if it does take me back to a time long gone last century.

I did not disturb any snakes. If there were any around, they were fast asleep and didn't notice there secure housing had been removed. let me get back to readers of the thread regarding nails a little later.

Regards
Paul

**Bushmiller** · 24th August 2022, 07:17 PM

Somehow I have always been involved in demolishing and recycling. This one was a little more challenging than, say, the demolition of dwelling or a shed. Luckily the timber being pine was a little easier than it might have been if it was all Aussie hardwood.

I thought I would describe the tools I used and the methods I employed. First up a few tools:

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The claw hammer is to drive nails back out of the timber and not to lever the nails out. A claw hammer is pretty useless for the purpose here and really the claw is only for when a you are nailing and mis-hit a nail. In other words it is for ocassional use in removing nails. The vice grips are good if a nail breaks and there is not much to grab. The small bolt cutters are used when a nail bends. Snipping off about 10-15mm allows the nail to be driven easily. Pincers are for a similar reason as the vice grips. The blue crayon is for when I can't easily remove a nail and have to leave it there. That is for when I rip the timber down to smaller sizes. Ordinarily I would not be using the splitting wedges, but in for this job they were essential. The "club" hammer started life as a sledge hammer (3.15Kg it says on the head) but I converted it. The 600mm pinch bar is the Gorilla brand while the 900mm bar, which looks identical, is completely unbranded.

The subject of pinch bars has been investigated before on the Forum and there are more sophisticated devices around I am told, but in this case I liked the sheer strength of these bars and for the flat head nails fixed by a nail gun they did an excellent job. These bars were levers as well as de-nailers. On the smaller timbers I drove a wedge into one end so I could then use the pinch bars first with the shallow end and then the 90° hook end. A I5" nail with a spiral twist has a lot of holding power, particularly when nailed from both sides.

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A piece of timber gives extra leverage for withdrawing these long nails after they are punched flush with the timber.

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Gloves are there to avoid splinters and the safety glasses are a good idea. When withdrawing a nail sometimes it will fly up in the air. The glasses may prevent an eye injury. I try to hold the nail as it comes out, but fatigue can set in, which is most when accidents happen.

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This was how the smaller timbers were separated.

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The larger timbers required more persuasion as there were quite a few nails.

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More to come.

Regards
Paul

**Bushmiller** · 24th August 2022, 07:41 PM

Nails: There were a lot of them.

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I transferred them to a 15L bucket. They weighed in at just under 20Kg

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There were some coach bolts too.. The long ones were 350mm. Qite a few 250mm and some more at 100mm. I will keep the bolts, but not the nails.

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Of course, not everything went smoothly. This happened several times and was an indicator of poor timber and bad storage conditions. This one below broke because it was rotten having become wet in the weather. Other breaks were because a knot dominated too much of the timber and was a weak point. Visual timber grading must be very light on for this type of useage.

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The claw hammer was another casualty. It is an Estwing that I have repaired twice already with a timber handle instead of the original leather. It broke with two boards to go

. I used a wooden handle claw hammer for the last two boards and found it to be much better! I have another heavy claw hammer that needs a handle so I think I will go down that track this time.
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Two pairs of sawhorses were damaged. The first one broke in half when I was pounding the wedges into the large beams. They were replaced with some heavier pine as in the pic.

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This one damaged when I drove one of the wedges into the lower timber by accident. It and it's mate are in need of new tops so they will have some work done too.

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And now for the burning question as to whether it was all worthwhile? I think you have to be fairly determinted to undertake this type of venture. I will be making up the frames in small sections either 1.2m or 1.5 m wide so I can assemble them easily with batten screws.

That fun is still to come.

By all means share your thoughts.

Regards
Paul

**Simplicity** · 24th August 2022, 08:03 PM

Paul,

You are more determined than me, that’s for sure.
Will you be entering the Local Arm wrestling competition later.

An Sis certainty owes you big time.

Cheers Matt.

**Bushmiller** · 24th August 2022, 08:38 PM

Originally Posted by Simplicity

Paul,

You are more determined than me, that’s for sure.
Will you be entering the Local Arm wrestling competition later.

An Sis certainty owes you big time.

Cheers Matt.

Matt

For the first couple of days I felt like I'd been in an arm wrestling comp: And lost

Regards
Paul

**FenceFurniture** · 25th August 2022, 09:43 AM

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

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An heroic effort Paul! If anyone needed to buy a Nail Kicker, it is you. Once those beams were separated it would make very short work of de-nailing that:
Slide the nozzle over the pointy shaft of the nail
Squeeze the trigger
Pssht-dang
Go fetch the nail from the next paddock!

I bought mine, used it for that massive job I had (cypress floor on hardwood joists, 60 years old) and sold it just recently for about the same as I paid. One of the best pieces of kit I've ever had.

**Bushmiller** · 25th August 2022, 10:07 AM

FF

Now you tell me. Looks like it would have helped and saved the hammer. The videos I watched lead me to believe I would still have had to withdraw the nail from the timber with some of my beams as the nail was still sitting in 75mm of timber after it had been hit through. Also a twisted shank nail has a huge amount of holding power compared to a smooth shank nail.

Regards
Paul

**Bushmiller** · 25th August 2022, 11:42 AM

I have just realised I omitted one of the most important tools for breaking down pallets or floors for that matter. I actually made up two: One for the double joists at a little over 100mm and another for the tripple joist at a bit over 150mm.

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Originally I thought I only had the blue bar and I would need to swap from one to the other. Consequently the bars were not secured into the lifters. It was a bit of an inconvenience. Subsequently I realised I had another old bar, which also fitted the tube, but I never actually used it. A couple of times the boards were too firmly fixed and I need more leverage still: This piece of pipe fitted over the spigot was the solution shown below against the taller of the crowbars for comparison. (Archimedes was right about his lever theory)

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Something of this nature is essential to avoid breaking the boards as they are removed unless you have one of Fence Furniture's pneumatic Nail Kickers. However, I am not sure it would drive the nails through the 150mm joists and I was well away from an electrical power source (it is at a power station

but out in a paddock) so I would have required a petrol/diesel powered air compressor. A bit too complicated.

Regards
Paul

**Pagie** · 4th September 2022, 09:52 PM

Lots of nails.

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