Pallets for marine and boatbuilding businesses
Three harbours, a string of boatyards and a long marine trades tradition mean this is one of the busier sectors on our patch. It is also one where the wrong pallet is very obvious very quickly.
The marine pattern of work
Marine businesses around Portsmouth Harbour, Langstone, Chichester Harbour and the Gosport peninsula share a strongly seasonal rhythm: fit-out and launch in spring, servicing and repair through the summer, lift-out and lay-up in autumn, refit work over winter. Pallet demand follows that curve, with spikes at each turn of the season.
The materials involved are varied and often awkward — engines and gearboxes, sheet materials, resins and coatings, spars and fittings, chandlery stock, and heavy items on small footprints.
Weather, salt and outdoor storage
A great deal of marine storage happens outdoors in a yard within reach of salt spray. Timber pallets left standing in those conditions weather fast, and a pallet that has been wet for a month behaves differently to a dry one. Where pallets will be reused outdoors season after season, plastic is often the more economical answer despite the higher starting cost.
Where pallets are used once and broken down, sound used timber is the cheaper and more sensible route.
Heavy items and point loads
An engine on a small footprint concentrates its weight in one place, and that is what breaks pallets. If you are palletising something dense, tell us the weight and how it sits on the deck rather than just the overall size. We would far rather specify a stronger pallet at the outset than deal with a failure in a yard.
For anything shipped abroad, marking requirements apply and need checking — exportpallets.co.uk in our group covers it.