Thursday, September 4, 2014

Pallet Cooler

Having snagged a few pallets from work, I decided I better do something with them before the spousal unit has a fit.  Digging around the interwebs, I ran across a stand up cooler made from them!  Perfect!  After watching a few youtube video's of others builds, I took from most of them, added my own twist and ended up with this;



It was really a fun build! I've shown it to a few people and have now committed to building 2 more of them myself, and assisting on another 2.  Some of the features;

  • Bottle opener mounted to the side... for Corona's and other non-twisty top bee.. sodas!
  • Plumbed in a valve that has a garden hose sized connection on the side.  This allows me to connect a piece of garden hose and drain the cooler off the deck without a wet mess everywhere!
  • All but 2 support pieces of wood (for the under side of the cooler) came from pallets at no cost and would have gone to the dump otherwise.
  • Cheap!  Well - ish...  I figure about $60 in parts with the cooler, plumbing fixtures, hinges, handles, opener et al.
All in all, was really worth the hastle to do - I bet I have 12 hours plus into the build, but subsequent builds will go much faster. Tearing down the pallets is a LARGE chunk of the build time.

The next build I call "version 2.0" has a few minor updates - wider side shelves to hold drinks easier as you put-them-in or take-them-out. Plus that allows me to also attach handles made from the "tops" of the legs as well for easier moving.

To see how to build this check out this page.