Selective Pallet Rack
Every pallet on the aisle, reachable on the first touch. The rack most warehouses should start with.
A selective bay is two upright frames with a pair of load beams between them, repeated down a row. Pallets sit one deep against the aisle, so a driver pulls any pallet without moving another. Every position has its own address and nobody digs.
When selective rack is the right answer
Count your part numbers against your pallets per part number. Carry a lot of items and only a pallet or two of each, and access is worth more than density. The same holds if stock is date coded, if slotting changes through the year, if pallets vary in size and weight, or if cases get picked by hand. Selective is also the cheapest system to install, and a beam level adjusts in minutes.
When it is the wrong answer
Hold a short list of items in real pallet quantities and selective rack wastes your building. Every row needs an aisle, and the aisle is floor you pay rent on. Density is the better answer.
Drive in rack puts pallets several deep in a lane the forklift drives into, loading and picking from the same face, so the last pallet in is the first out. Right for one commodity in volume, wrong for anything dated. Push back rack runs pallets on nested carts down an incline, two to six deep off a single face. Pallet flow loads one end of a lane and picks the other, so the oldest pallet leaves first. Cantilever rack takes material that never sat on a pallet: pipe, lumber, bar stock, tube, extrusion, sheet goods and more. Bulk storage shelving holds hand stacked cases, and a mezzanine answers a shortage of floor rather than of pallet positions.
Roll formed teardrop or structural bolt together
Roll formed rack is cold formed steel. The column is punched with teardrop shaped openings, the beam connectors drop in and lock, and a level moves in minutes with a rubber mallet. It is lighter, cheaper, and what most buildings need. Structural rack is hot rolled channel with the beams bolted through to the uprights. It carries more and shrugs off a forklift strike that would fold a formed column, but every level change is bolted. We specify it for heavy loads, freezers and washdown areas, narrow aisles where the steel takes a beating, rack that holds up the building itself, and anywhere a formed column will not survive the traffic.
What a bay is made of
An upright, or frame, is two columns tied together with diagonal and horizontal bracing. Load beams span the frames and carry the load. Under each column a footplate, or baseplate, is anchored into the slab, with shims where the floor is off level. Wire decking drops into the beams so nothing falls through, or pallet supports run across the bay where the level needs bearing but no deck. Row spacers hold back to back rows square and keep the flue open. Column protectors take the hits, and wall ties, safety bars and more go in as the room needs.
How a bay gets sized
We start with the pallet you actually build, not the nominal one. Its footprint sets frame depth and how far the load hangs past the beams. Its weight sets beam capacity, rated per pair, and frame capacity, which changes with level spacing. Load height plus a hand of clearance sets the beam pitch, and the level count falls out of the clear height under the sprinklers, less the room the deflectors need above the top load. Aisle width comes last, set by the lift truck already in your building. A counterbalance, a reach truck and a turret truck want three different aisles.
Single deep or double deep
Double deep sets two rows back to back with no aisle between and stores pallets two deep off one face. You gain positions and cut the number of aisles in half. What you give up is first touch access: the back pallet waits for the front one to move. So you want two pallets of an item in a lane and a double reach truck to place them. Good trade in a building out of floor, poor one where most items come a pallet at a time.
Anchorage and seismic work
In California rack is engineered for seismic loading and anchored to the floor, and that drives details a catalog layout skips: baseplate size, anchor type and embedment, the thickness and condition of the slab underneath, how the frames are braced and tied. We check the slab before anchors go in, because an anchor set in a thin topping pour holds nothing. The drawings and the engineering the city and the fire department want to see are ours to produce and ours to file.
What we do
Best Rack lays out the system, does the engineering, pulls the permits, supplies and installs the steel, relocates systems into new buildings, tears out rack no longer earning its space, inspects standing rack and more. For steel you already own, start with a warehouse rack inspection. The rest is on our services page. Thirty years of it, across Southern California and the country.
Schedule a free onsite visit. We will measure the building, look at your pallets and your truck, and come back with a layout.