Yard notes
Nine ways a pallet dies
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Roughly 57,000 pallets came across our repair line last year. Almost all of them arrived having failed in one of nine ways.
Knowing the nine is useful in two directions: it tells a repair line what to do, and it tells a warehouse what it is doing wrong. Most of these failures are caused by people, not by time.
| # | Failure | Share | Usual cause | Repairable? | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lead board crushed or missing | 31% | Mis-set forks | Yes, easily | $1.75 |
| 2 | Deck board split along the grain | 19% | Point loading, drops | Yes | $1.90 |
| 3 | Stringer cracked at the notch | 14% | Forks entered the notched face | Yes, with a plug | $3.20 |
| 4 | Shiners across the deck | 11% | Smooth-shank nails | Yes, shear and reset | $0.80 |
| 5 | Stringer split on the nail line | 9% | Age, dry cycling, overload | Yes, companion stringer | $4.10 |
| 6 | Racked out of square | 6% | Bad stacking, clamp trucks | Yes, re-jig | $2.40 |
| 7 | Bottom board detached | 4% | Dragging on concrete | Yes | $1.60 |
| 8 | Mould or rot | 4% | Stored wet | No — rejected | — |
| 9 | Stringer broken through, both sides | 2% | Gross overload, drop from height | No — dismantled | — |
The two that end it
Mould and a broken stringer are where a pallet stops being a pallet. Everything else is a job.
Mould is a rejection at every grade, and it is not a judgement call. It spreads to adjacent units in a stack, it transfers to product, and it is a genuine health issue in food environments. We isolate mould-bloomed units at the gate and they do not enter the yard at all — not the repair line, not the grinder, not the mulch feedstock.
A stringer broken through on both sides has failed structurally in a way no repair restores. A companion stringer works because it takes over the load path from a member that is cracked but continuous. When the member is in two pieces, there is nothing to companion.
The one everybody causes and nobody notices
Number three — stringer cracked at the notch — is almost entirely preventable. It happens because someone drives forks into the notched faces of a partial four-way pallet, which is exactly what those notches invite you to do. The notch is 9" wide and the fork is 4", so the fork enters and then levers against the top of the notch.
Thirty seconds of training per forklift operator would remove fourteen per cent of the damage we see. It is the highest-return training in a warehouse and I have almost never seen it delivered.
Point loading, the silent one
Number two — split deck boards — is usually blamed on drops, but a substantial share is point loading. A dense item on a small base concentrates force in the gap between two deck boards, and hardwood will split along the grain long before it crushes.
- Spread concentrated loads with a slip sheet or a plywood cap.
- Orient dense items over the stringers, not between them.
- If the load footprint is under about 12" square and over 400 lb, assume you need a spreader.
- Do not stack a drum directly on a seven-board deck without one.
What the mix tells you about a customer
Because these failures have different causes, the mix in a returned load is diagnostic. A site returning 45% lead-board damage has a fork discipline problem. A site returning 20% mould has a storage problem. A site returning a broad, even mix across the nine is simply using pallets hard and normally, and there is nothing to fix.
We tell customers what their mix is when we do a buyback of any size. It costs us nothing, occasionally it costs us a repair job, and it has earned more repeat business than anything else we do.