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Raw material pricing has everyone cringing. How can you save money on your shipping materials while still ensuring your product arrives safely? In today’s marketplace, businesses are hampered by inflation while still trying to offer products that are advantageous for customers to purchase. How do you accomplish this when material costs are going up from the time you place the order to delivery? Two words... smart packaging.  Smart design starts with understanding your product attributes and shipping environment. In previous discussions about pallets, I touched on the nature of the load that a pallet might be expected to handle. If you are a pallet geek like me, the term “unit load” is often used to describe the goods that are configured in such a way as to be easily handled by that pallet. So, I guess the unit load is and has always been associated with pallets, right? Well, not exactly. Although we can trace the use of pallets all the way back to ancient times, the common use of pallets to handle the unit load did not get going until World War II.  Labor intensive material handling in New York City (1877) Why is my 2x4 lumber not 2 inches by 4 inches? Many decades ago, lumber purchased from a sawmill physically matched the common dimensions we use today. So why does that pine or spruce 2x4 from your local lumber yard now come up short? The short answer is modern surfacing and shrinkage. Over time we've come to accept these nominal (approximate) dimensions as standard. But there's still a catch. Shrinkage can be highly variable. This makes it very difficult to manage and regulate dimensional accuracy.  Dimensional lumber is a term given to boards cut to standard sizes (specified in inches). This page has been updated and permanently moved to:
https://www.nelsoncompany.com/blog-post-basic-rules-of-dimensional-lumber-nominal-vs-actual.cfm Every pallet user has experienced fastener failures at some point. Putting a nail or screw into a wooden pallet sounds simple enough, but it can actually get quite technical. When there is a failure, a good set of photos is often enough for an engineer to identify if the problem is the fastener or something else entirely.  Different types of fasteners, from the left, helical (screw) thread, Annular (ring) thread, plain shank, and staple. What does cubing out mean? Cube out refers to efficiently optimizing the amount of space to ship or store products. The products are properly organized to reduce the costs of freight per piece: Lower Freight Expenses = Higher Profits  This page has been updated and permanently moved to:
https://www.nelsoncompany.com/blog-post-what-does-cubing-out-mean.cfm How do you know if a pallet design is going to be successful? You test it of course! The goal of a pallet test is to compare different pallet designs, materials and their performance. There are numerous laboratory tests for evaluating all aspects of the pallet. However, the most important pallet tests fall within three parameters for pallet design:
 This page has been updated and permanently moved to:
https://www.nelsoncompany.com/blog-post-3-most-important-pallet-tests.cfm Most people probably don’t consider pallets as complicated structures. But believe it or not, there is actually a Research Lab at Virginia Tech that has been dedicated to the testing and research of pallets for over 40 years!  Launched in 1976, the Lab was funded by a true partnership of pallet companies and the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association (NWPCA). Its mission over the years was to conduct research, most of it very applied to the industry and pallet users
Recently, the Nelson Technical Center encountered a problem that was not only causing a big headache but was also costing our customer valuable time and money. The Problem: a load of oriented strand board (OSB) pallets were “bowing.  The pallet was a solid wood block-style pallet with an OSB panel for the top deck. Usually, a bowing pallet is not a big issue. Once you load product on most pallets, the weight will will flatten out any bowing. In this case, an empty single-bulk corrugated box was to be glued to the panel deck pallet. This page has been updated and permanently moved to:
https://www.nelsoncompany.com/blog-post-tech-center-to-the-rescue-the-case-of-the-bowing-osb-pallet.cfm |
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