There are only two mainstream ways to build a wooden pallet, and almost nobody chooses between them deliberately. They inherit a footprint from whatever arrived last, and then spend years adapting their equipment to a construction decision nobody made.
The stringer pallet
Three — occasionally four — lengthwise runners of lumber separate the top deck from the bottom deck. Those runners are the stringers, and they carry the load in bending. Cut notches into them and a forklift can enter from all four sides. Leave them solid and you have a two-way pallet that only accepts forks on the ends.
Here is the catch that costs people money: a notched stringer pallet is four-way for a forklift and two-way for a hand pallet jack. The notch is deep enough for tines but not for jack wheels, which need to roll along the floor inside the opening. If your warehouse runs manual jacks and someone specified notched stringers, your crew is turning every platform ninety degrees by hand. Forever.
The block pallet
Replace the runners with nine blocks — four corner, four edge, one centre — joined by connecting boards top and bottom. The gap under the deck is now continuous on all four sides, so a pallet jack genuinely enters from any direction. This is the European standard and the reason EPAL looks the way it does.
It costs more. It uses more lumber, has more components, takes longer to assemble and weighs noticeably more, which eats into payload on weight-limited lanes. In exchange you get real four-way access and, generally, a stiffer platform.
How to actually choose
- Count the manual pallet jacks in your operation. If the number is high, block construction or a dedicated jack-accessible design pays for itself in labour within a year.
- Check the weight limit on your heaviest lane. If you are near the ceiling, every extra pound of pallet is a pound of product you cannot ship.
- Ask whether the platform gets rotated during handling. Square footprints and four-way access matter enormously in a tight aisle and not at all on a straight dock-to-dock run.
- Look at what your customers' docks run. A platform your receiver cannot handle efficiently becomes their complaint and eventually your problem.
The middle option nobody mentions
You can build a stringer pallet with deeper, wider notches specifically sized for jack wheels, or with a partial bottom-deck layout that gives jack clearance on the long side. It is not standard, it is not free, and it is frequently the right answer for a plant that runs jacks on one axis and forks on the other. We build these regularly and almost nobody asks for them, because the question never comes up until the equipment has already been bought.
Decide this on purpose, once, and write it into your spec. It is a five-minute conversation that determines how many times a day someone in your building has to turn a pallet by hand.
What each one actually weighs and costs
Rough figures for a 48 × 40 in our market, and they move with lumber, so treat them as ratios rather than prices. A recycled notched-stringer GMA platform runs 33 to 48 pounds depending on species and board thickness. An equivalent block platform runs closer to 50 to 65 pounds, because nine blocks plus connecting boards top and bottom is simply more wood than three runners.
On cost, a block platform is typically somewhere between a third and three-quarters dearer in recycled stock, and the recovered pool is thinner, so lead times are longer and the price is more volatile. In new construction the gap narrows a little because assembly is more comparable.
The weight difference matters more than people expect on weight-limited lanes. Twenty extra pounds of platform across 26 trailer positions is more than 500 pounds of payload you are no longer carrying, every load, forever. For dense product that is a real line on a freight bill.
Three failure modes that differ between them
- Stringer pallets break at the notch. The notch concentrates stress in the member doing the bending, and it accounts for around a quarter of everything on our repair bench. A fourth stringer or a radiused notch mitigates it; nothing eliminates it.
- Block pallets fail at the connecting boards. The blocks themselves rarely break. What goes is the board joining them, usually the bottom one, usually from a jack wheel riding up on it.
- Stringer pallets wear at the bottom board ends; block pallets wear at the corner blocks. Both are repairable, but a corner block replacement is a slower job and in licensed EPAL stock it is a job only a licensed repairer may legally do.
The question to ask before you decide anything
Who handles this platform after it leaves your building? A construction supplier shipping one-way to sites has a completely different answer from a brewery running a closed loop between two plants. In the first case the platform never comes back and jack access is somebody else's problem; in the second, every awkward rotation is paid for by your own crew, thousands of times a year.
We would rather have a ten-minute conversation about that than quote you a footprint. It is the only part of this decision that is expensive to change later.
Marcus, yard supervisor · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published December 6, 2023 · 883 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.