Hello Forum -
After a long absence (I missed getting to read and learn from the posts...) I am back, with another puzzling design issue.
I am tasked with removing the staples and thumbtacks, brads, and some small screws from 16,000 pieces of 2"x6"x6' clear stain grade white oak. Almost every board has around 100 staples, 12-20 tacks, 10-20 brad nails, and some have 8-20 small (#8) wood screws.
All the wood is rough hewn, circa 1845 tobacco plantation, and is being repurposed and saved from the dumpster. But the reclaimed wood has to be planed/jointed to thickness and flatness so it can be incorporated into furniture and placed back into the restoration project.
With standard planing technologies that I know about, all the metal has to come out of the wood before it goes through the planer or we will need 16,000 sets of knives...or a whole lot of knives grinding and sharpening. Not a good plan.
So, the brainstorming begins... magnetometer for detecting small remnants is easy and obvious.
But how to efficiently get all the tiny bits out?
Ideas we have kicked around so far-
1) extremely powerful electromagnet. Simple to design, perhaps not so simple to operate and may not be effective or efficient. We have no idea how strong the magnet would have to be, but we do know from experimentation (roses and chocolate will get you a long way with some MRI technicians) that a 3Tesla MRI magnet would not pull a freshly driven regular swingline paper staple out a sample of the red oak. We could definitely feel the tug on the staple, but it did not pull out. That's the most powerful magnet we know about. Can we build an electromagnet that has a much stronger, focused, field because the field can be much smaller than the bore of the MRI machine?
2) Spinning device similar to Drum Sander, but with converted drum with lots of small barbs that would snag on the staples and pull them out.
3) One Hundred unskilled Laborers at $10 per hour, one hour per board using needle nose pliers and staple pullers and screwdrivers, $160,000 and 20-24 days to complete the project.
4) planer/jointer machine that can eat metal bits without ruining the knives, or some other machine that sands/grinds/scrapes the surface flat and leaves behind small bits of metal, but the boards are all flat.
5) Six guys, six years, six visits per year to the mental health clinic for Xanax refills...
6) Find another 1845 plantation that has not been reused as horse stalls and bulletin boards for the past 100 years and does not have such a massive accumulation of fastener contamination.
Any thoughts or suggestions from past experience will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
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