When reclaimed lumber arrives at our facility, it's beautiful but dangerous. After decades in a barn or factory, every piece is riddled with nails, screws, staples, and sometimes wire or metal strapping buried deep in the grain.
We've found some remarkable things embedded in reclaimed wood over the years: square-cut nails from the 1800s, pieces of barbed wire that a tree grew around before being milled into a board, and once, a .22 caliber bullet lodged an inch deep in an oak beam.
Our de-nailing process starts with a visual inspection, but that only catches the obvious stuff. The real work happens at our metal detection station — a commercial-grade detector that can identify ferrous and non-ferrous metals up to 6 inches deep in the wood.
When metal is detected, we extract it by hand. Small nails come out with specialized pullers that minimize surface damage. Deeply embedded fasteners sometimes require careful drilling. In rare cases, we'll mark a section for cutting around if extraction would damage too much usable wood.
Why does this matter so much? A single hidden nail can destroy a $400 carbide saw blade in an instant. More importantly, a nail flung from a spinning blade at several hundred miles per hour is a serious safety hazard. We've seen the damage — and we never want to see it at a customer's shop.
Every piece of lumber we sell has been metal-detected and hand-de-nailed. It's one of the most labor-intensive steps in our process, but also one of the most important. When you buy from North Iowa Lumber, you can put that wood through your planer, your saw, or your jointer with confidence.