In heavy equipment manufacturing, agriculture, and the steel industry, industrial & sustainable packaging is needed long before it’s time to ship out a finished product. The custom pallets, skids, and bases we design not only help store heavy duty products, they assist in the manufacturing process and simplify packaging by eliminating double handling.
How Custom Pallets, Skids, and Bases are Designed & Built
After conducting a walk-through or obtaining a product drawing, our packaging engineers design custom pallets, skids, or bases from a combination of hardwood, softwood, panel products, and foam. Each order is developed according to the customer’s unique needs and can be adapted for both storage and transport in any warehouse, shipping container, or workcell.
Some design elements are used to streamline the manufacturing process. For example, packaging engineers may include casters for manual movement from workcell to workcell, or raise the height of a pallet, base or skid so that a forklift can pass under it. By improving transport during manufacturing, custom industrial pallets, bases, and skids help to maximize productivity and eliminate waste.
Around 65% of the total industrial packaging produced by Timber Creek is ISPM 15 certified for international shipping. Hardwood pallets, skids, and bases are sometimes subject to heat treating for this purpose. All softwood materials arrive to our facility kiln-dried and marked with the heat treat stamp. The ability to source these materials from our own mills bolsters sourcing integrity and lowers the final cost of pallets, skids, and bases for the customer.
How Custom Industrial Packaging Prevents Double-Handling
The better suited a custom pallet, skid, or base is to the overall operation, the faster and more cost efficient that process will be. With a little creative engineering, it’s possible to use the same custom bases for both internal and external logistics. This eliminates the problem of double-handling and streamlines both packaging and manufacturing.
By securing a corrugated enclosure on top of an existing custom base, we can form a shipping box around the product. Like custom industrial pallets, skids, and bases, these enclosures are unlimited in size and volume. To keep the packaging process fluid, enclosures can be quickly and easily nailed to the base or banded at the end of the manufacturing process.
Other customizations secure products without the need for additional packaging, no matter where or how they’re likely to be transported. For example, it’s possible to run the top boards of base on a CNC machine to create mounting hole patterns. This allows heavy machinery to be anchored down for both secure shipping and internal transport. A design can also utilize V-notched saddles to cradle heavy components and keep them from rolling off while in motion. Radius blocks are also sometimes bolted to the decks of a pallet for the same reason.
For more information on custom pallets, skids, and bases at Timber Creek, contact Tom Nelson by phone at 414-755-4922 or by email at tomn@fca-timbercreek.com.
