Taking advantage of the vertical storage space within your warehouse can be beneficial. Loading goods onto pallets and storing them on pallet racks can allow you to maximize the amount of product you are able to keep on-hand at any given time.  

To ensure that faulty pallet racking doesn't lead to serious injury, it's important that you conduct routine checks for signs of weakness. Here are three things you should be looking for when evaluating the integrity of your pallet racking in the future.

1. Check to ensure pallet racks are not overloaded.

Placing too much weight on any individual pallet rack could spell disaster. Since manufacturers design pallet racks to withstand a certain amount of weight, it's essential that you take the necessary precautions to stay within the recommended weight limit as you load the pallet racks in your warehouse.

Placing a label with the individual weight of each pallet in a prominent location on the exterior of stored pallets will allow you to quickly calculate the total weight resting on your pallet racks at any given time.

2. Inspect for weld integrity.

Many pallet racks are constructed from durable metal materials. In order to create the shelving that makes pallet racks so versatile, manufacturers must weld various pieces of metal together. The integrity of these welds plays a central role in determining how safe your pallet racks are.

The bead in a properly welded seam will have the appearance of a stack of dimes. If you notice that a welded seam has not been back purged (meaning the front of the weld does not look the same as the back of the weld), this could be a sign that the weld is weak. Repairing any weakly welded seams before loading your pallet racks with product can be a simple way to prevent injury in your warehouse.

3. Ensure that there are no bent or buckled sections of metal.

Although the metal material used to construct pallet racking is extremely durable, your pallet racks could become weak if sections of this metal become bent or start to buckle.

Since metal pallet racks are under continual pressure to bear the weight of the pallets loaded on them, the crystal structure within the metal can become brittle. This is known as metal fatigue. If metal is bent or buckled in an area where metal fatigue has set in, your pallet rack could snap and cause heavy objects to fall onto workers below.

Conducting routine checks for weak spots in your pallet racking system will keep your warehouse safe in the future. For further assistance, contact a local company, such as Commercial Hardware.