Racking protection
February 1st 2006

While the advantages of racking protection are widely acknowledged, some products available to fulfil this task can prevent the detection of potentially serious problems with uprights during regular maintenance. e-racking offers a solution

If there is a high degree of activity in your warehouse, the chances are your racking is at risk of being damaged by the forklift trucks operating at the site.

Worryingly, even a minor collision with a forklift can significantly weaken a rack structure and lead, ultimately, to racking collapse and all the costs and general disruption that inevitably brings to a business.

In an attempt to minimise the effect of a clumsily manoeuvred forklift on their storage system, more and more companies are fitting rack 'guards' or 'protectors'. The guards are attached around the rack uprights and provide a level of padding that absorbs much of the impact of a truck or other mechanical handling equipment.

Day-to-day maintenance

However, concerns have been raised that such devices - while highly effective in cutting impact damage - can prevent potentially serious rack upright problems from being identified during day-to-day maintenance routines.

The difficulty for anyone charged with assessing the condition of racking is that the protectors should be removed and replaced as part of the inspection. With many of the protectors currently on the market being semi-permanently secured by cable ties, the checking process is often slowed down dramatically - with the inevitable consequence that short cuts are taken and damage missed.

But now a new guard device is available that not only reduces the damage to warehouse racking caused by forklift impact but can be fixed-to and removedfrom a wide range of racking column sizes by hand in one quick and simple action.

The Protect-It Column guard was developed in Australia where it is already widely used and is now being offered in the UK through Yorkshire-based eracking.

The Protect-It unit features a springclip design that makes additional fixing systems such as velcro, or bolts and concrete plugs redundant.

As a result, Protect- It takes just seconds to remove and reinstall allowing visual racking inspections to be undertaken quickly and effectively.

Under impact

Protect-It consists of an outer wall that is integrally moulded to a series of curved 'spring like' energy absorbers at the front and the sides to provide two levels of protection for columns. Under light to moderate impacts the outer wall deforms to resist the impact then the Protect-It unit returns to its original shape. Under higher impacts the outer wall deflects even more, contacting the energy absorbers and delivering increased impact absorption. This staged response means that the product is flexible enough to accommodate every day knocks and bumps yet robust enough to withstand substantial forklift impacts.

Protect-IT meets the necessary design standards. For instance, it passes the frontal impact test specified in the European standard FEM 10.2.02. This is equivalent to a 2.6 tonne forklift travelling at 2km per hour. The product has also been extensively tested for use in cold store environments and performs well in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees centigrade.

Peter Gobbi, managing director of eracking, comments: "Of course all warehouse managers should encourage their truck operators to drive forklifts responsibly but, as everyone knows, accidents do happen. If a rack collapses a business may be faced with the need to replace materials and goods damaged in the accident and use temporary storage facilities. Then there's the subsequent costs of any legal proceedings which may ensue and, perhaps most importantly, the incalculable human costs if a member of staff is injured or worse.

"By installing Protect-It column guards users have the peace of mind of knowing that their racking is not only shielded from much of what an ineptly driven forklift can do but that, when it comes to regular maintenance, inspection routines can be carried out efficiently and thoroughly with downtime and disruption kept to an absolute minimum."

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