Hi all,

bit of a wierd question, but i've been smashing up a load of spare palletes from work, to get wood for kindling and i've collected almost 100 nails from them.
I've got a tonne of free kindling, but was wondering if I could use the nails for anything?

It seems like a waste to just throw them away. They range from clean ish to very rusty and all are bent!

I was wondering if the wood i've been getting off the palletes would be hot enough to forge in?
Basically from work I can get an almost endless supply of wood for free. Might be a money saver for a bit of effort.

if nothing ells the pallets should make good charcoal if you are in a area where you can do that
my very first forge was a deep cone shaped one with a good sized blower under it that i used hardwood to fire and if i was not on top of things i could burn my work in it

Hello Tom, what I would do is reduce the pallet wood to charcoal then use that to forge with. Nails are usually alittle better than mild steel, but not by much. I've seen many people make nice "J" hooks from them and use them as elements in other work.

Sure you could weld them up, be a bit of a job to do it but people have welded up odder stuff. Probably more for bragging rights than because they are great in that usage.

Perhaps do a can weld of lathe swarf with brakedrum turnings shook into it and the straighter nails shoved down into that in a pattern...

The biggest problem with using pallets for fuel is getting all the nails *out* before use otherwise you tend to get "false alarms" as nail bits burn deep in the fire while your stock may be still too cold to forge.

I glean pallet nails after burning the soft-wood scraps in a domestic heating fire. The nails are more or less annealed and make reasonable small rivets for armour, furniture etc.
Andrew.

last weekend was at an event were someone had a small charcoal fired smelter and was trying to convert nails into a billet for knife forging by smelting.
I make charcoal out of the 2 X 4 from pallets. This has plenty of nails I seperate from the charcoal before putting it in the forge with a large magnet. I then recycle the nails with the rest of my scrap iron

Smelting is taking ore and reducing it into metal. Taking metal and heating it up doesn't count. Sounds more like they were maybe trying to make OROSHIGANE.

it did not look like much to me.
he said it sparh tested like iron on the bottom and steel near top
it needed to be heated to forge weld temp and refined but ran out of time
we did play with a 500 # LG hammer at the same event.
I did not draw anything just upset and punch1 1/2" all thread to make candle holders