A Bowen Basin coal group ended weekly pallet failures with a bespoke heavy-duty deck
A Bowen Basin coal-handling group moving an awkward, point-loaded pump skid.
A point-loaded skid crushing every standard pallet
A coal-handling group in Queensland's Bowen Basin had a recurring make-safe problem with one particularly awkward load: a heavy pump skid whose feet concentrated their weight onto a few small contact points, and whose footprint overhung every standard pallet in the yard. On timber decks the result was predictable and weekly — the point loads punched through or split the boards, the overhang meant the skid bridged a gap and deflected, and maintenance kept getting called out to make safe a failed pallet under an expensive piece of equipment. Standard pallets simply were not designed for a load that sat on a handful of points and hung over the edges, and the group was burning labour and timber chasing the failures rather than fixing the cause.
Why a pallet built to the load, not the load forced onto a pallet
The fix was to stop buying generic decks and build one to the job. The group specified the Custom Heavy Duty Plastic Pallet (BPB-CUSTOM-H), moulded in a tough PC/PO/HDPE blend and engineered as both rackable and stackable to the skid's exact footprint and load profile. Purpose-sizing the deck meant the skid sat fully supported across its real contact points rather than bridging an unsupported span, which is what removed the deflection failures the timber had suffered. Building it to the actual footprint eliminated the overhang. And specifying a heavy-duty plastic construction rather than timber gave a deck that does not split under concentrated point loads and does not rot or get eaten in a humid, outdoor coal environment. The tooling cost of a bespoke pallet is real, but against a load that was destroying a standard pallet every week, sizing the deck to the point load was the only thing that actually addressed the root cause.
Rollout across the fleet
The group proved the bespoke pallet under the problem skid first, confirmed that the deflection and splitting had stopped, then adopted the spec across the handful of positions that carried the same awkward load. Because the pallet is both rackable and stackable, it fitted the group's existing storage and handling without special accommodation. The weekly make-safe call-outs that had been the symptom simply stopped appearing.
The estimated result
The value here is dominated by two things: eliminated failures and extended life. We estimate the bespoke unit lasted an estimated 8–10 times longer than the timber it replaced under the same point load, because it was built for that load rather than failing under it. Just as important, purpose-sizing the deck removed the recurring make-safe call-outs entirely, taking out both the labour cost and the safety exposure of a pallet failing under heavy equipment. Across the affected positions, that combination of a far longer service life and the end of weekly interventions is estimated to comfortably justify the one-off tooling outlay on the custom pallet. As with any bespoke solution these are planning estimates rather than a quoted return — the realised payback depends on how many positions carry the load and how the failures had been costing the group in labour and downtime. But the principle is clean: when a standard pallet keeps failing under a non-standard load, building the pallet to the load is what ends the problem.