I'm not sure how much weight it will take to sink a pallet with stakes??? Flotation force (buoyancy) will depend on amount of wood involved. When they become water logged almost no weight would be needed. You may have to experiment unless someone here has experience with it. It might take a lot of weight to get a pallet and 10-20 2X4s to sink. Consider ripping the 2X4s making 2X2s. Maybe ask on the crappie forum?
A lot of stake beds are made by pounding the stakes into the bottom often during low water level. Here are a couple things I found from crappie.com.
Poster1 How do you get yours off the boat and into the water and sitting upright? We had a row of conveyor rollers on the front of a work boat. Took 2 of us to shove it off evenly. With the front of the bed going into the water 1st, we had more weight on the backend so it would catch up while going down in deeper water. 8' x8' beds, with 5 rows of basicly 1x4's, 7 boards to a row. Caught a lot of fish off those.
We would get used concrete blocks that had mortar in them, clean 1 hole out and slide the empty hole over 1 of the vertical stakes. 3 blocks in the front and 4 on the back. Lot of work but was worth it. Did about 700 of them.
Poster2 “Use rocks in corners between top and bottom pallet boards and just slide over the side. Helps to push down on high side to level them out as they go over..
The short ones I make out of pallets will flip if you put blocks on top.” NOTE I THINK HE MEANS THE CEMENT BLOCKS SHOULD BE UNDER THE PALLET NOT ON TOP TO REDUCE PALLET FLIPPING AS IT SINKS.
From:
https://www.crappie.com/crappie/cra...-mgmt/283776-building-pallet-stake-beds/See the picture near the bottom of this link for using stakes in cement blocks. Numerous structure ideas in crappie.com forum
http://fox1966.org/Crappie%20beds.html
