And you've been burning them ?

[fred]

Or eBay ref no 251670679631

[Adrian]

or even

£12/m2 for bits of pallet...? Nice work if you can get it! £30/m2 supplied and fitted isn't too bad, though.

There's a place near here, a "shoplet" room within a retro shop, who've done their floor in parquet made from old pallets. Looks bloody brilliant

- but I know it drove the guy nearly mad doing it...

[stuart noble]

Blimey, we're going back to the 60s. There are good reasons why UK grown softwood is only fit for fences and pallets

[The Natural Philosopher]

not even suitable for that.

most pallettes are made from imported wood

[GB]

Care to explain, please?

[Brian Gaff]

Cam you believe that someone actually really wanted a rickety old pair of decorators steps i was going to toss in the rubbish as a garden feature, suitably varnished to stop them rotting of course. There are obviously budding Tate Modern artists out there. Brian

[stuart noble]

It's a latitude thing. You need long, hard winters to grow decent tight grained European Redwood. Finland, Siberia etc.

[stuart noble]

Artists always overlook the practical, especially if you let them loose in the garden

[GB]

Ah, thx, I'll remember that.

[Theo Markettos]

Paint them in a bit of leftover magnolia emulsion and flog them on ebay as 'shabby chic'. Seems to work for some people. I prefer to drop the word 'chic'.

Theo

[Nightjar]

ITYM it is a climate thing. Novosibirsk is not far off the same latitude as Aberdeen, but the former has an average low temperature of -20.9C in January, as compared to +0.2C at Aberdeen Dyce airport.

[stuart noble]

Indeed.

[Bod]

[polygonum]

And more, Wiki says:

The oldest known giant sequoia based on ring count is 3,500 years old.

[Bod]

[stuart noble]

We're talking about European Redwood here (pinus sylvestris) aka Scots Pine. Those big buggers in California are a different species altogether, probably not used for pallets :-)

[Adrian]

They'd make some very large pallets, though.

[polygonum]

Not necessarily...

[Weatherlawyer]

And now forget it.

After WW1 Britain organised the Forestry Commission to grow spruce for timb er props in mines. Right up until a few decades ago there was a tax relief for millionaires to grow spruce on their Scottish tax havens.

Around about the time that spruce-bark beetle took over, they started cutti ng down British forests as fast as they could make a penny on them which me ant that a lot of the trees were too immature for decent timber and would n ot have been joinery grade timber anyway, as spruce is a white pine and wil l not accept fine finishing.

It has nothing to do with the fact that red pine is grown in Scandinavia wh ere stands avoided getting the chop to make trench boards. I doubt that col d winters are the reason for their usefulness as warm summers are what make the rings.

[stuart noble]

Oh dear. Summer growth is what you definitely don't want. Pinus Sylvestris grows all over northern Europe and its value is determined by how short the summers are. In Siberia the ports are only navigable for a month or two, so Kara Sea material is legendary. Welsh pine is rather less so.