2604 



Chapter 22 



transit with lumber dunnage. At intermediate warehouses, the goods were again 

 handled case by case — loading, unloading, storing, selecting, and shipping to 

 the retail outlet. Whether the order was for a few or a few thousand cases, the 

 handling system was the same. 



Forklift trucks and haul jacks, together with wooden skids, bases, and pallets, 

 have mechanized handling to move and store multiple cases of product as a 

 single unit. The unit-load concept originated within the warehouse. After World 

 War II, traffic men realized that extension of unit-load handling throughout the 

 shipping and receiving cycles could reduce distribution costs substantially. In 

 the late 1940's the building-materials industry, oil refineries, the chemical 

 industry, breweries, meat packers, and steel fabricators began shipping their 

 products on expendable wooden skids or pallets; reusable pallets were common- 

 ly used only within the plant. 



Skids preceded pallets in development and general use (Bond and Sendak 

 1970). A skid (fig. 22-19) is differentiated from a pallet primarily by its lack of 

 bottom boards. Skids for shipping purposes take many forms; design procedures 

 are given in Anderson and Heebink (1964, p. 68-73). Pallets have bottom 

 boards, the deck may or may not be solid, the stringers are less deep than runners 

 on most skids, and they are generally two to five in number (fig. 22-20 top). 

 Some pallet designs do not employ stringers but rather have blocks separating 

 the deck and bottom boards (fig. 22-20 bottom). 



Schuler and Wallin (1979) found that the pallet industry in the United States is 

 composed of approximately 1 ,300 pallet manufacturing firms; about 50 percent 

 employ less than 10 persons and fewer than 5 percent employ more than 50 

 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1954-1977). Additionally, there are numerous 



Figure 22-19. — Skid or Type I pallet is single-faced, non-reversible, and customarily 

 made only in two-way design (i.e., forklifts approach parallel to stringers). Typically 

 such skids are used for bricks, concrete, cinder blocks, and heavy materials in wooden 

 boxes or crates. 



