Most stillages are designed once and then lived with for twenty years. Get the geometry right at the drawing stage and you have a unit that stacks square, handles cleanly and takes abuse. Get it wrong and you spend the next two decades working around it.
This guide covers the decisions that matter when you are fabricating stillages or post pallets in-house, and where the feet fit into all of it.
Start with the load, not the box
Everything downstream follows from the load, so be specific about four things before you draw anything:
- Static load. What the stillage carries when full.
- Stacked load. What it carries when there are three more on top of it. This is almost always the governing figure and it is the one most often overlooked.
- Load distribution. A point load from a casting behaves nothing like an evenly spread load of components.
- Dynamic load. What happens when a forklift sets it down harder than it should.
Design for the stacked case, not the single unit. A stillage that holds a tonne comfortably on its own can fold when it is third from the top in a four-high stack.
Footprint: match the standard, not the part
There is a strong pull towards sizing a stillage around the part it carries. Resist it unless you have to.
If your stillage matches a standard pallet footprint, it fits your existing racking, your lorry beds and your neighbour's forklift. The European standard is worth designing to: the EUR or EPAL pallet is 800mm x 1,200mm x 144mm, a four-way pallet with a safe working load of 1,500kg. Around 450 to 500 million EUR-pallets are in circulation, which tells you how much handling infrastructure is built around that footprint. Wikipedia + 2
A bespoke footprint costs you every time the unit moves through a system designed for standard sizes.
How the load actually travels down a stack
This is the part that determines your foot design.
In a well-designed stack, load runs down the corner posts, through the feet, and into the corner posts of the unit below. The base frame and the deck carry the contents. They should not be carrying the stillage above.
That means the feet have to line up with the corner posts, both on the unit below and above. If the feet sit inboard of the posts, you are loading the base frame in bending every time you stack, which is how base frames start to sag.
Two practical rules:
- Put the feet directly under the load path, in line with the corner posts.
- Give the feet a locating function so a stacked unit sits into position rather than resting on top of it. A foot that drops into or over the post below stops the stack walking as the forklift nudges it.
Foot design and fixing
Weld-on feet are the norm on steel stillages for good reason: the joint is as strong as the members either side of it, there is nothing to work loose, and there are no fasteners to shear under repeated impact.
What to think about:
- Weld preparation. The foot needs enough contact area to develop a full weld around the joint. A foot with a small footprint on a thick post gives you a stress concentration.
- Orientation. Feet should present a flat, stable bearing surface to the floor. Any rocking transfers into the frame.
- Damage tolerance. Feet take the worst of the forklift contact. A heavier foot is cheap insurance next to a bent base frame.
- Replaceability. If a foot is destroyed, can it be cut off and a new one welded on without dismantling the unit?
Our pallet feet range covers heavy duty weld-on stillage feet for exactly this application, and if you need feet that adjust rather than sit fixed, the levelling feet and threaded inserts range runs from M6 to M34 threads with load capacities up to 16,000kg.
[PRODUCT DATA TO INSERT: available foot sizes, load rating per foot, steel grade and finish. Not currently published on the /pallet-feet page.]
Forklift and pallet truck access
Decide early which will handle the unit, because they need different things.
Forklift access needs fork apertures wide enough and deep enough for the truck in use, with entry from at least two sides and preferably four. Pallet truck access needs clear floor space under the deck for the wheels to drop, which means the aperture height and the internal clearance both matter.
If the stillage will be moved by hand once loaded, consider fitting castors instead of fixed feet. Our material handling and warehousing range covers heavy duty options, and Parnells supply castors rated from light duty furniture up to 50,000kg.
Finish and environment
- Indoor, dry: painted finish is usually adequate.
- Outdoor or yard storage: galvanising pays for itself, particularly at the feet, which sit in standing water.
- Food, pharmaceutical or washdown: specify stainless throughout, including feet and any castors, and avoid crevices that trap water. Parnells stock stainless steel castors and stainless levelling feet for these environments.
Five mistakes worth avoiding
- Designing for the single unit load and forgetting the stack.
- Feet that do not align with the corner posts.
- A bespoke footprint that fits nothing else in the building.
- Fork apertures sized for the forklift you have now rather than the one you will buy.
- No locating feature, so stacks drift out of square and eventually topple.
Parnells supply the steel fabrication and material handling sectors with heavy duty weld-on pallet feet, castors, wheels and levelling feet, backed by 3 million+ parts in stock and same day dispatch.