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Technical questions go straight to the graders.
Most pallet problems are dock problems wearing a disguise.
Forty-one percent of the repairs on our bench are lead board failures — the outermost deck board at each end. Everyone assumes operator error, and some of it is. When we go on site and watch, the pattern is usually mechanical: a dock plate sitting a quarter-inch proud, a settled apron, a crowned leveller, a trailer that drops when it takes load.
The same is true of most of the other complaints we field. Mould is a storage problem, not a wood problem. Picker time wasted digging for a usable platform is a sorting problem, not a supply problem. The pile behind the building is a convenience problem — it formed because the easy place to put a broken pallet was nowhere in particular.
None of these need a project. They need somebody to spend an afternoon with a clipboard, watch twenty fork entries at tine height, lay a straight edge on the dock plate, and time how long a picker takes to find a good platform. We do this free for customers because it almost always finds something, and what it finds is usually cheap to fix and embarrassing to have missed.
- Watch twenty fork entries at tine height. The damage pattern tells you the cause.
- Crushed boards mean a step the tines are climbing; splintered ends mean a gap they are dropping into.
- Separate grades at receipt, not at point of use. It is the cheapest change available.
- Film is a vapour barrier. Wrapping a damp stack builds a greenhouse for mould.
- A drop trailer stops the pile forming, because the convenient destination is always thirty feet away.
- Blaming operators for damage caused by a quarter-inch lip on a dock plate
- Storing platforms directly on concrete, which wicks moisture into the bottom course
- Wrapping stacks that came in cold or damp and discovering the bloom on Monday
- Holding fifteen weeks of platform inventory against a two-day lead time
- Letting the broken-pallet pile grow until a surveyor writes it up as a fire load
8 on operations, newest first.
Pest management in a wood yard
Four acres of stacked timber is habitat. Keeping it from becoming habitat is mostly geometry and housekeeping, not chemistry.5 min · 955 words · Marcus, yard supervisor
October 7, 2025Nine seconds: inside a grader's decision
A trained grader spends about nine seconds on a platform and makes seven judgements. Here they are, in order, as they happen.5 min · 904 words · Dale, repair lead
June 3, 2025Pallet jacks, notches and the two-way trap
A notched stringer pallet is four-way for a forklift and two-way for a hand jack. That sentence has cost more warehouse labour than any other in this industry.4 min · 810 words · Marcus, yard supervisor
January 14, 2025Winter: the quietest season for pallets and the worst for wood
Volume drops, prices soften, and every stored platform in the Mid-Atlantic spends three months absorbing and releasing water.4 min · 851 words · Dale, repair lead
October 8, 2024Shrink wrap is not storage
Film is a transport aid. Leave it on a damp stack over a weekend and you have built a greenhouse for mould.4 min · 812 words · Dale, repair lead
June 11, 2024How to run a pallet audit in one afternoon
No consultant, no software, no project plan. A clipboard, a tape measure and four hours will tell you most of what is wrong.4 min · 874 words · Marcus, yard supervisor
February 20, 2024The dock plate is eating your lead boards
Forty-one percent of the repairs on our bench are lead board failures. A surprising share of them trace back to one piece of steel nobody has looked at in years.4 min · 874 words · Dale, repair lead
November 14, 2023What a pallet costs you after you buy it
The purchase price is the smallest number in the total cost of a platform. Here are the six others, and roughly what each one runs on a mid-sized dock.5 min · 1,020 words · Dale, repair lead
The tables behind these posts.
The same data we work from in the yard, so you can check the arguments above against the numbers.
| State | Moisture content | Mould risk | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green, off the saw | 60–120%+ | Very high | Heavy, moves as it dries, blooms readily. Rarely what you want. |
| Air dried, yard stored | 15–22% | Moderate | Typical of outdoor recycled stock in a humid month. |
| Kiln dried | ≤19% | Low | Below the biological threshold for mould. The usual specification. |
| Kiln dried, millwork grade | 8–12% | Very low | For cladding and interior work, matched to heated-interior equilibrium. |
| Reclaimed, long service | 10–16% | Low | Years of cycling beat any kiln schedule for stability. An under-appreciated advantage. |
Moisture content is water weight divided by oven-dry weight, which is why green softwood can exceed 100%. Heat treatment is not kiln drying — see moisture explained.
| Tier | Stock release | Repaired stock | New build | Heat treated | Surplus pickup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | 24–48 hours | 3–5 business days | 7–12 business days | Same day on held stock | 48 hours, full trailer |
| Regular | 3–5 business days | 5–8 business days | 10–15 business days | 48 hours | Next scheduled run |
| On demand | Next paired run | 8–12 business days | 12–18 business days | 72 hours | Full trailers, scheduled |
Working days from a confirmed order against an agreed specification. Standing-release customers run shorter than these because we hold buffer stock sorted to their spec.
Relative demand pressure on the Mid-Atlantic recycled pool across a year, indexed to the October peak. Harvest, retail peak build and the construction push before winter overlap in roughly eight weeks. Hover or tap a month for what is happening in it.
The terms these posts assume you know.
Vocabulary is the cheapest performance upgrade in this industry — almost every argument we have with a new customer comes down to two people using the same word for different objects.
- Companion board
- A second board nailed alongside a damaged one to share the span. A legitimate repair; drops a pallet to B grade.
- Core
- An unsorted, un-repaired used pallet — raw material for a recycler. Sold by the load.
- Deck coverage
- The percentage of the pallet footprint actually covered by boards. Drives whether cartons bridge or sag.
- Dunnage
- Loose wood used inside a load for blocking and bracing. Needs its own ISPM-15 treatment for export.
- KD
- Kiln dried — moisture reduced, usually to ≤19%, to prevent mould and dimensional movement.
- Lead board
- The outermost deck board at each end. Takes the most abuse and is the most replaced part of any pallet.
- Plug
- A lumber insert repairing a broken stringer. Structurally sound; cosmetically obvious.
Where operations meets what we actually sell.
Operations questions we get.
How do I know whether my dock is damaging platforms?
Stand beside it at tine height and watch twenty entries without telling anyone why. Count clean entries against strikes, and note whether damage lands on the top or bottom lead board. Top suggests the tines are rising over a step; bottom suggests they are dropping into a gap. Then lay a four-foot straight edge across the plate and look for a crown or a dip.
What is a reasonable amount of platform inventory to hold?
Enough to cover your lead time plus a safety margin for your demand variability — which for most sites on a two-day lead time is one to two weeks, not fifteen. We routinely count four to five times the needed buffer, held in three or four places that do not know about each other.
Can mouldy pallets be saved?
Surface mould on structurally sound wood usually can — brushed off, or kiln-dried out for food programmes. Blue stain penetrates and discolours without weakening anything, so it is a cosmetic rejection rather than a structural one. Soft, crumbling wood that gives under a thumbnail is decay and that platform is finished; it goes to the grinder.
Eleven more areas.
NoteSubject pages are reachable from the blog index and from every post rather than the main menu. The full archive lists all forty posts by year.