Pallets

The pallet is the part of your packaging that the carrier actually touches. Every forklift, every pallet jack, and every dock plate interacts with the pallet rather than the freight, so a weak pallet turns into damaged freight even when everything above it was packed perfectly.

The parts of a pallet

Every pallet needs a bottom deck

This is the single most common pallet problem, and it is easy to check. Bottom deck boards do four jobs:

• They stop the pallet collapsing sideways. Forklift operators routinely push on the corner of a pallet with a fork tine to turn it before loading. Without a bottom deck, stringers fold and blocks shear off.
• They stop freight tipping off the tines. A pallet with nothing tying the bottoms of the stringers together flexes, and tall freight uses that flex to fall over.
• They make double stacking safe. A bottom deck spreads the load of whatever is placed on top of your freight.
• They hold strapping in place. Straps run under the bottom deck boards, which is what stops them sliding along the pallet.

Pallets longer than 80 inches

Long freight is where pallet design stops being a formality. A long pallet gets picked up in the middle, slid across dock plates, and lifted with fork extensions, all of which put force in places a standard pallet never sees.

Three reinforcements matter on long pallets, because a fork tine lifting near the middle pushes down hard at its heel and tip:

1. Screw the top deck, do not nail it

   Screws hold far better than nails in the deck boards that carry the load, and these are the boards that fail first.

2. Strap the leading bottom deck board

   A strap across the lead board keeps it from being torn off when the pallet is dragged or slid.

3. Recess that strap into a dado cut

   A shallow groove cut across the deck board keeps the strap from touching the ground, where it gets abraded and snapped.

If you have to splice stringers to reach the length, stagger the splices at least 48 inches apart, support each splice with top and bottom deck boards that run the full width, and leave fork tine access at the center of the pallet. Overlapping splices should overlap by at least 24 inches.

Wood and fasteners

• Softwood: use #3 Standard grade or better. Douglas fir, hem-fir, spruce pine fir, and southern yellow pine all work. Avoid #4 Utility grade and below, and avoid cedar.
• Hardwood: use #3A Common grade or better. Ash, cherry, maple, oak, and walnut work. Avoid aspen, basswood, cottonwood, and poplar.
• Avoid recycled wood in both categories. You cannot tell what it has already been through.
• Keep moisture content below 20 percent to prevent mold.
• Avoid knotty wood. Knots weaken lumber significantly, and knots wider than a third of the board are specifically not allowed.
• Nails: at least 0.099 inch wire diameter, and never plain shank. Coated shanks hold much better.
• Screws: at least 0.105 inch wire diameter.
• Never use staples.
• Fasteners should pass through the first board and at least 1.25 inches into the second. If the second board is thinner than that, clinch the nail so the tip is buried rather than exposed.
• Heads flush, tips buried. A protruding head or tip is both a freight hazard and a hazard to the people handling it. A head driven well below the surface loses holding power.

If you are shipping the pallet outside Canada and the United States, wood packaging is also subject to the international phytosanitary standard ISPM-15. That is separate from anything in this guide.

Paper pallets are not suited to LTL

Paper-based pallets, whether paperboard, corrugated, or honeycomb, are a poor fit for freight and are best avoided:

• Water is the problem. Liquid water reduces the strength of paper-based packaging by more than 90 percent, and trailers get condensation, docks get rained on, and floors get puddles.
• Humidity alone weakens them badly, in the same way it weakens corrugated boxes.
• They do not survive being turned. Forklift operators use the tines to rotate freight into position, and paper pallets are not built for that.
• They sink into decking tables. When a pallet is placed on load beams inside a trailer, a paper pallet flexes down into the gap and then becomes very hard to get out without damaging the freight.