So How Are Quality Wood Pellets and Biomass Pellets Made? Well, there is a lot more to it than simply dropping material into a pellet mill and hoping for quality pellets to come out the other end. We have had to help many people who have fallen into the trap of been told by pellet mill re-sellers that, "Making pellets is easy!" Been able to produce quality pellets is a true skill, whether you are making pellets at home or in a large scale pellet production facility. As with any skill you can only learn through good advice, and that's what we hope to give you with the free Beginners Guide To Making Pellets and the full PelHeat guide. Making Pellets Is About Quality, Productivity and Energy Used Putting material into a pellet mill to make a 'pellet' is not difficult at all. However neither is mixing some flour and eggs together, putting it in the oven to make a 'cake'. Not all cakes are made equal, as some are horrible and the same goes for pellets. For a fuel pellet to be fit for purpose it needs to have a good density and low moisture content, and you cannot tell the difference just by looking at them. The only way to produce a quality pellet is to know what your doing. As well as the quality of the pellet, to make pellet production a worth while venture you need to achieve maximum productivity and keep pellet mill energy consumption to a minimum. For instance, just a 2% change in raw material moisture content has shown to reduce pellet mill productivity by 70% and pellet mill energy consumption to increase by a massive 39%! Moisture control is key. The Beginners Guide To Making Pellets From Wood / Biomass To introduce you into the world of making pellets, we have produced the free beginners guide to making pellets. This guide will introduce you to the basic principles of pellet production, and the different types of pellet mills. The beginners guide will also make you aware of the dangers in purchasing the wrong pellet mill for your chosen raw material, and various quality issues with some pellet mills sold on the internet today. While the 'Green Energy Revolution' is a positive move forward, there are many individuals and companies selling equipment they have no experience of, which also is not fit for purpose. The Complete Guide To Making Pellets Making quality pellets efficiently and been able to replicate the process time after time does require good knowledge of the process and the equipment. Also every material is different, and what works for one may not work for another. Therefore you need the knowledge to be able to recognise what is going on within the process to resolve potential issues that may occur. Pellets can be used for fuel, animal feed, animal bedding, BBQ pellets and much much more. Fuel pellets are now used in power plants, and millions of homes all around the world. The demand for pellets will continue to rise, and therefore the supply of wood pellets and other biomass pellets must increase. Wooden pallets skidsA wooden skid is basically a pallet without a bottom deck. Wooden skids are sometimes also called platforms
The skids are often used as permanent foundation for machinery, with the advantage of being mobile at the same time. Wooden skids don’t have to be permanent foundations; they could also be used as a cheap version of wooden pallet when transporting machinery and equipment from a manufacturer.
Buying wooden pallets skids It is often quite easy to get very cheap or even free wooden skids as they are often thrown away after being used for transporting goods. Unlike the more expensive (and better) wooden pallet. Asking at construction sites could often get you free wooden skids.
If you are in need of a special size of wooden skids or a larger amount of skids it is better to order skids from a company. Since wooden skids are a kind of wooden pallet but with simpler construction, it’s often much cheaper.
Try to get quotes from a couple of skid manufactures and you should be able to get a good price.
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| Goeman's Wood Products is one of the largest wood pallets and skid suppliers in Wisconsin, including custom wood packaging products. Not only a supplier to Wisconsin, but supporting the needs throughout the Mid-West for the last 30 plus years. We take great pride in our ability to develop, design and produce pallets and skids for any application, and provide shipping solutions for your product's needs at an economical price. Our manufacturing capabilities range from:
- High volume, fully automated pallet and skid assembly to
- Small quantities of specially designed custom pallets and skids
We are also a nationally networked company with supporting businesses across the country working together with Goeman's to insure your product needs are met anywhere across the United States. These networked businesses provide Goeman's Wood Products direct support to your company needs for your out of state divisions or branch offices. They will work under the direct guidance of Goeman's to insure the pallet or skid design is manufactured to Goeman's "PDS" specifications.
We use "PDS" Pallet Design Software© along with AutoDesk's™ AutoCAD™ software to maximize pallet and skid designs to ensure your product's safety from its point of origin to its final destination safely and economically. - Wood pallets are available in both "Stringer" and "Block" style construction
- Wood skids are only available in "Stringer" style construction (unless special ordered)
- Pallets and skids can be constructed from these lumber types: hardwood, softwood, plywood and OSB
- Designs include 2-way, 4-way, flush, wing, inset or plywood deck
- Optional Features include: banding, chamfering, drilling, fasteners, notching, stenciling
- Heat treat chamber on-site to meet all export shipment requirements
- Full package engineering services utilizing PDS and AutoCAD® 2D and 3D software
- Specializing in manufacturing of new GMA spec 48 x 40 4-way pallets and also offers modified GMA spec 48 x 40 grade "A" used pallets.
Use the "RFI" Request for Information selection button to make your inquiry to our engineering and sales staff, along with your design concept (if any) and let us advise you in creating the best and most economical shipping solution to meet your needs.
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| Pallet and Skid Components | New Pallets and Skids | Used and Recycled Pallets | Remanufactured Pallets | Pallet Overruns For Sale | |
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Once a customer’s order is entered into our production planning system, a material cut list and product specifications are generated. Then the order progresses through into production following these stages:
Cants (large pre-cut wood beams of a known LxWxH and selected wood type) are loaded onto an automated conveyor in our material handling area outside the production and asssembly building. Where they are transported in and aligned on our Brewer Gang Saw's in feed rail as they travel into the building and up to the gang saw's workhead, waiting to be cut into stringers for pallets and skids. - We buy "Cants" by the semi load from a variety of saw mills throughout the surrounding area. This allows us to locate raw materials for the most ecinomical method of providing finish goods to our customers.
- The Brewer Gang Saw cuts the cants and other deck boards (if needed) to the design specifications:
- The blades are all pre-set and checked for each new order coming into the facility, to assure that the stringers are all cut to the correct length, width and thickness per the design specifications.
- Once the stringers are cut and stacked, a forklift takes them along with the pre-cut deck boards over to the assembly staging area.
- Depending upon the Dimensional Size and Quantities of the pallets being fabricated.
- Quantities of "300 units or Less " go to our hand built assembly line.
- Quantities "Greater than 300 units" depending upon size and stringer style go to the Viking Turbo 505 automatic pallet assembly machine.
Most of our deck boards are purchased from those same mills precut, but our saw line has the capability to cut deck boards in the case of a unique design specification and or a rush order is in need of being filled. |
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WOOD PALLETS AND SKIDS
October 11, 2010 This classification covers establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing wood or wood and metal combination pallets and skids.
NAICS Code(s)321920 (Wood Container and Pallet Manufacturing)
The manufacture of wood pallets and skids is the largest segment of the wood container industry. Pallets are made of platforms that are specially designed to allow heavy crates and boxes to be easily moved by forklift. Pallets play an important role in the shipping, handling, and storage of a huge variety of materials in an equally vast array of industries.
Hardwood lumber, such as oak, was used for 67 percent of the wood in pallets at the turn of the twenty-first century. Manufacturers used a total of 4.41 billion board feet of hardwood lumber for pallets. Other wood materials used included stumpage, logs, and cants. Waste materials were sometimes used by pallet manufacturers to make fuel wood, bedding, pulp, or charcoal, among other products.
The biggest pallet users are the food, steel and metal, paper and printing, and chemical industries. The most common pallet produced is the flushed stringer, double-face, nonreversible type measuring 48 by 40 inches, which is most often used by supermarkets. Since the 1980s, technology has played an increasingly important role in the pallet and skid industry, contributing to both production and design improvements. Most pallet manufacturers still used hand-held nailers and semi-automated equipment in 1980. By the 1990s, however, fully automated assembly systems allowed two laborers to put together 1,200 pallets in a day, at least four times the rate of production that hand nailers allowed.
Industry leader PalEx Inc. of Houston, Texas, which generated 1998 sales of just under $320 million (up 43 percent from 1997), merged in 1999 with Munich, Germany-based International Food Container Organization (IFCO). PalEx manufactured, recycled, and rented wooden pallets from its 71 facilities in 23 states and seven Canadian provinces, while IFCO supplied 50 million collapsible, reusable plastic produce containers to 15,000 supermarkets in 15 European countries. The combined company, named IFCO Systems, allowed PalEx to expand its pallet business into Europe and IFCO to expand its plastic container business into North America, setting the foundation for the combined firm to expand into Latin America and Asia. In 2004, the former PalEx business was operating as IFCO System North America.
Rounding out the top three industry leaders were Love Box Company Inc. of Wichita, Kansas, with 2002 sales of $175 million and 1,500 employees, followed by TRAK International Inc. of Port Washington, Wisconsin, with estimated sales of $100 million in 2002.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 2,000 establishments operated in this category at the turn of the twenty-first century. Industry-wide employment totaled 51,311 workers receiving a payroll of $1.12 billion; 43,817 of these employees worked in production, putting in more than 81 million hours to earn wages of almost $793 million. Overall shipments for the industry were valued at almost $4.4 billion in 2001.
The vast majority of pallets and skids produced in the United States were made of wood. The remaining pallets were made of wood composite, cardboard/corrugated, metal, plastic, or other materials. In 2000, about 429 million new wood pallets and skids were manufactured in the United States. Used and/or repaired pallets added an additional 233 million to this total. The per firm annual production of pallets in the United States doubled between 1980 and 1995. The average daily production of new and used wood pallets per firm, per shift, totaled 1,337 in 2000. The industry was operating at roughly 58 percent of its capacity that year.
Computers have had a major impact on pallet design since about 1980. In the mid-1990s, a computer-assisted
Pallet Design System enabled manufacturers to better analyze the pallet needs of a particular product and to build pallets specifically tailored for that product. For example, a company dealing in a fairly light commodity could save money using pallets made from softer, less expensive wood.
By the 1990s the pallet industry had incorporated recycling. More than 40 percent of all firms used some recycled pallets during production in 1995, with an average of 131,500 recycled pallets used annually per firm. Recycling became a more common low-cost option for wood pallet companies as competition from nonwood pallet producers increased. The wood pallet industry responded to this challenge with the development of “enhanced pallets,” which are more resistant to fire and rot than conventional pallets. There was also a trend toward producing multiple-use pallets, which could be leased by customers and returned when worn out. Fueling the growth of recycled pallets in the early 2000s was an increase in raw materials costs. In 2003 alone, hardwood pallet raw materials costs jumped 11 percent, pushing hardwood pallet prices up 4 percent.
Several trends were expected to affect the pallet industry in coming years. In addition to growth in recycling and leasing pallets, and the use of nonwood materials, producers will continue automating the design and manufacturing process. Consolidation, like the PalExIFCO merger, should also continue. A shrinking labor force combined with future Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and environmental legislation were also expected to affect the industry, as well as the chance of reduced access to federal forest lands.
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