How to Fill Holes in Wood Pallets?

Pallet boards all have holes due to nails, sometimes it’s not a problem, and it can even be an aesthetic detail. In other cases, such as for the creation of aprons for a dining room table, for a work surface in a kitchen, or for cutting boards, holes in the boards are not needed and should be filled.

It is not always possible to have pallet boards or pieces of boards long enough for work and without holes. So what can we do?

Several solutions are available to us and we will show you some of them below.

The epoxy

Fill the holes with epoxy, the hole will remain visible but will be filled and thus we obtain a flat and impermeable surface. The concern is that epoxy is a chemical product and it is, therefore, a bit out of the natural and co-responsible approach that we are trying to put in place. Therefore, this is not a solution we recommend!

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Wood Dowels

You enlarge the hole with a drill and plug the hole with a wood dowel and wood glue. It’s a good idea and it’s effective. In some cases, when we have several holes next to each other or a hole larger than the size of the wood dowels, this solution is not applicable.

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The “patch”

The patch is a solution that consists in placing a square of wood above the hole. We dig the wood with chisels or a router above and around the hole, then glue a square of wood to it to plug the hole. The advantages of this method is that no matter the size of the hole it works. I am also talking about making a square piece of wood to plug the hole but it is not mandatory, the patch can take the shape you want according to the desired effect. We can have triangular, rectangular, butterfly-shaped, sawtooth etc…

The only disadvantage of this method is that it is time-consuming and requires a specific ability. Now given the result, the game could worth it.

Below is a video explaining the wood dowel and patch method:

Another video by Karell: