Walk into a warehouse where somebody is rotating a loaded pallet ninety degrees by hand with a jack, swearing, and you are looking at a specification error made years earlier by somebody who has since left the company.
The geometry
A forklift tine is a flat blade that enters above floor level. A hand pallet jack has wheels that must roll along the floor inside the pallet opening, and then lift. Those are different clearance requirements.
A notch cut into a stringer gives a tine somewhere to go. It does not give the jack's load wheels a continuous floor path, because the stringer still touches the ground between the notches. So the jack can enter from the ends, where the openings are fully clear, and not from the sides.
Why it is called four-way anyway
Because the term describes forklift access, and it was coined when forklifts were the only thing anybody cared about. The industry vocabulary predates the ubiquity of manual jacks, and nobody has updated it. A notched stringer pallet is correctly described as four-way, and a buyer who reads that as "my jack can get in from any side" has been misled by accurate terminology.
The three real solutions
- Block construction. Nine blocks instead of runners, continuous floor clearance on all four sides, genuine four-way jack access. More lumber, more weight, more cost, and the reason Europe standardised on it.
- Deeper, wider notches sized for jack wheels. Non-standard, cheaper than block, and frequently the right answer. We build these and almost nobody asks.
- Partial bottom deck. Omit or reposition bottom boards to give a jack path on the long side. Changes the load spans, so the deck needs re-specifying rather than just modifying.
The fourth solution, which is free
Orient your racking and staging so jacks always approach from the ends. Sometimes the pallet is fine and the layout is wrong, and moving a staging line is cheaper than re-specifying a platform fleet. We have told customers this and lost the order. It was still the right advice.
Diagnosing it in your own building
Count the manual jacks. Then watch for ten minutes and count how often somebody turns a platform to get a jack in. If that number is above zero per hour, there is a recoverable cost sitting in your spec, and the recovery is a line in your next purchase order rather than a capital project.
The dimensions that decide it
A hand pallet jack has load wheels, typically around 80 mm in diameter, mounted at the tip of each fork. Those wheels must roll along the floor inside the pallet opening and then lift the fork, which raises the wheels onto the lower deck boards. The vertical clearance needed under the bottom deck is small; the horizontal clearance along the floor is what matters.
A notch cut into a 3½-inch stringer gives a forklift tine about nine inches of width and a couple of inches of height — ample for a flat blade entering above floor level. It does not create a continuous floor path, because the uncut sections of stringer are still sitting on the ground between the notches. The jack wheel meets wood.
Counting the cost in your own building
Stand in a staging area for ten minutes and count the rotations. Each one is roughly fifteen to thirty seconds of a person's time plus the risk of a strained back. A site doing it two hundred times a shift across three shifts is spending something close to a full position annually on turning pallets to suit a specification decision.
That number is almost never attributed to the pallet, because the rotation feels like part of the job rather than a defect. It is the clearest example we know of a cost that is completely invisible until somebody stands still and counts.
What the three fixes actually cost
- Block construction: typically a third to three-quarters more per platform in recycled stock, plus 15 to 25 lb of extra weight. Genuine four-way jack access. The right answer for a jack-heavy closed loop.
- Deeper, wider notches sized for jack wheels: a small premium over standard notching, no weight penalty, no standard to point at. We build them; almost nobody asks.
- Partial bottom deck: roughly cost-neutral, because you are moving boards rather than adding them. Changes the load spans, so the deck has to be re-specified rather than simply modified.
- Re-orienting your staging so jacks always approach from the ends: free. Frequently the correct answer, and the one that loses us the order.
The sentence that prevents the whole problem
Put this in your specification, not "four-way": hand pallet jack access required from the 40-inch faces. Name the equipment and name the faces. The industry term describes forklifts, it has done since before manual jacks were everywhere, and nobody is going to update it.
Marcus, yard supervisor · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published June 3, 2025 · 810 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.