Trash or treasure?
Let me ask you something—if you happened past this pile of wood laying out with someone’s trash, would you stop to pick it up? Looks like an old shipping pallet, doesn’t it? Hardly good enough for kindling, and certainly not good enough to build a nice amplifier box, right?
There’s a story behind this pile of junk that you may find interesting, and may explain why it’s in my basement after laying around in my back yard for more than a decade. Interested? Pull up a chair.
Back in the mid-‘80s, I worked in a family-owned hardware store. It was, at the time, somewhat bigger than your typical “mom and pop” shop and catered not only to homeowners, but also to contractors and commercial accounts for building maintenance. Building superintendents from the area school districts would often be in the store, as would people from Verizon, BMW of North America and some other well known companies. Well, toward the late ‘80s, one of the BMW of North American execs decided it was time to redecorate part of their building, like the CEO’s office or the Board Room. They ripped everything out, including some very nice slat partitions made of some unnamed solid wood. It was beautiful wood, deep red color and streaked with black, probably South American, perhaps exotic, and it was headed headed toward the corporate dumpster.
One of the building superintendents knew my father liked wood and woodworking and asked if he was interested in this stuff. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll send my son over to pick it up.” So off I went in the company pickup truck. I think I pulled out three or four slat panels, each one between 4’ and 5’ tall, and mostly 2’ wide and brought them back to the store. The panels were well made, with two 3/8” steel rods going through the entire thing with spacers to form a kind of grill. Each panel must have weighed in at better than 40 lbs.
Some of the slats were pulled off and used for different projects, or given to other woodworkers who expressed an interest, but most of the stuff just sat around, unused, after it proved to be brittle and a bit more difficult to work than what my father was used to. Eventually my mother decided it would make a lovely garden bench so put a panel up on a couple of tree stumps. Another went to be a potting bench and plant shelf. I think one was even disassembled and the slats used for garden stakes. They were used in this capacity, suffering all the indignities Mother Nature could hurl at them for many years.
When my parents moved, these were left behind. Instead of just throwing them in the garbage like any sane person would do, I stacked what was left up behind my garage figuring that they might make a good garden bench once again. I didn’t give them much thought for better than seven years. I had other projects, and other wood.
Fast forward to today and I was looking around my woodshed at the scores of board feet of Black Walnut stacked up, trying to decide if I wanted to use any of it to build a box for the amp. I like Black Walnut quite a lot but, truth be told, I didn’t want to use it for this project. I wanted something a bit more exotic. What did I stumble across when poking around? You guessed it—the ratty old slat panels that were pulled out of some executive office perhaps 20 years earlier. We have a few door saddles made out of this stuff and they look quite nice so maybe, just maybe, I can salvage enough to build something useful… like an amplifier box.
The steel rods have rusted and the slats wouldn’t budge without cracking, so I cut off the short ends, leaving a bit more than 36” of wood to work with from each slat. Some of the slats are warped so squaring the edges to glue them up will be a bit of a challenges, but I’m actually excited about making something nice out of this old junk.