From a total of 39,324 inspections last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found 88,846 violations. For warehousers, distributors and manufacturers, the list is familiar.
We’ve added a series of drawings from Steel King that detail out the critical dimensions for various kinds of pallet rack, ranging from selective to drive-in, to over-door pallet storage racks. It’s a small PDF file (just 368 KB) that shows front and side views of various rack types and the things needed to correctly specify them. It’s easy to print and has some other links to useful pallet rack information and web pages.
Check it out. If you’re working on a rack project, it’s one more tool you can put to fast use.
Wire decking is ubiquitous with selective pallet rack–it’s perhaps the most broadly-specified selective rack accessory. People use it to when they want pallet support with greater structural strength than other materials, when they want to load boxes or other non-palletized load onto racks, when they want to handle loads that aren’t deep enough to sit on uprights, and when they want to eliminate dust and debris inherent with solid decking materials…
To max out both storage and selectivity, warehouse managers are frequently moving to higher-density storage systems like pushback rack instead of floor stacking or selective racks. Whether a pushback system makes sense for you is something that depends on what you’re storing, how you are accessing it, and what you need to do with it once it’s picked.
Pushback rack systems can give you up to 90% more product storage than selective storage rack systems and up to 400% more selectivity than drive-in racking systems. They’re probably the best balance between selectivity and storage density.
Many people do not realize that when installing equipment such as pallet racks, mezzanines, shelving, in-plant offices, or many other pieces of common material handling and storage equipment that you may be required to obtain a building permit. If you ignore the building permit process it can cost you money in delays, fines, or even having to remove the equipment being installed until a permit is obtained.
It’s easy to understand the idea of pallet rack beam capacities. They’re listed, mostly, in a per-pair style and common in the 5,000 pound range so that you can rack a couple of 2,500-lb. pallets on a 96″ span. That’s probably the most common setup in the world. But if you’re not loading pallets correctly, you aren’t getting your full capacity rating. This article on beam loading methods explains it in detail, but the basic story is that if your load does not fully overhang or rest on the tallest part of the beam, you aren’t getting the full capacity because you’re not using all the steel and your load isn’t setting flush in the horizontal space.
Loads that rest on decking or pallet support put more pressure on the thinnest part of the beam, in the ’step’. This can diminish beam capacities. I’m not saying you can’t load racks this way (people do it all the time) but that you need to check out the capacity of the beams when they’re loaded on the step, not the full beam.
Read the article…it tells the story better.
