A wooden pallet is a deceptively simple object: a dozen pieces of sawn softwood or hardwood, a few hundred nails, and about ninety seconds of assembly. Yet almost every argument we have with a new customer comes down to vocabulary. Someone asks for a 'heavy duty 48×40' and means seven top boards. Someone else means a block pallet with a full perimeter base. Those two platforms differ in price by nearly double.
The deck
The deck is the surface your freight sits on. Top deck boards run across the stringers; the outermost two are the lead boards, and they take the beating from fork tines and dock plates. A standard GMA deck has seven top boards — two leads and five interior. 'Flush' means the boards end level with the stringer; 'single wing' or 'double wing' means they overhang.
Stringers versus blocks
A stringer pallet uses three parallel runners of lumber — the stringers — to separate top deck from bottom deck. Notch those stringers and a fork or pallet jack can enter from all four sides; leave them solid and you have a two-way pallet. A block pallet replaces the runners with nine blocks and connecting boards, giving genuine four-way entry for a pallet jack, which is why Europe standardised on it.
The small details that cost money
- Chamfered bottom boards let a pallet jack climb on without snagging. Worth every cent in a busy warehouse.
- Notch geometry is not decorative — a shallow notch concentrates stress and is the single most common failure point we repair.
- Nail pattern matters more than nail count. A stem-threaded nail driven to the right pattern holds far longer than twice as many smooth shanks.
- Deck coverage, not board count, drives whether your cartons bridge or sag.
Why we labour this point
Because a correctly specified recycled pallet outperforms a badly specified new one, costs a third as much, and keeps a tree in the ground. Vocabulary is the cheapest performance upgrade in the industry.
Written by the Pallets Recycle yard crew, Richmond VA. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.