So, I’ve been driving Cat C since February and love every minute of it but there is a question that I would rather not ask at work because I know I’ll get taken to the warehouse and ask to bend over while they all kick my backside.
The following are industry terms but Google has failed me so I’ll ask here.
Spaces - my truck holds 16 palettes on the floor so I’m confident when they say spaces, this relates to the number of spaces in the deck ?
Cube - I’ve tried to work it out looking at paperwork / the delivery to get an understanding of what this means but I don’t understand how it’s calculated and what it actually means. When my transport manager says ,“it’s probably 2 - 2.5 cube” I just nod in agreement
Pallets - A pallet is a pallet isn’t it ? I can see the difference between what I would call a normal pallet and an American pallet but otherwise they look the same. Sometimes I have to exchange pallets and I’m told ,“I’ve only got Euros mate” again, I nod and say ,“yeah, that’s fine mate” as it’d I know what he’s actually taking about.
What are the different types and how do I identify them ?
(I asked this on another forum but just got abused - you didn’t be driving a truck, did you do your cpc etc etc)
A standard pallet would be 120 cm X 100 cm and are also quite often referred to as Chep pallets (a bit like the term hoover, Chep is a brand name of a pallet company that has been adopted as a term for the actual product in general)
A euro pallet is 120cm X 80 cm so they are narrower than the standard pallet and don’t tend to have wooden beams along the bottom. You can quite often see them stacked one inside another (turn one upside down) underneath foreign fridge trailers.
I can’t remember the dimensions for an American type pallet but I think they’re slightly bigger than a standard pallet but when you try and move one with a pump truck you’ll know about it. They tend to have the wooden support beams underneath right where a standard pallet trucks wheels would push down so you can’t push a pallet truck right through without wedging it. Also the gap the forks go into is much narrower and you can only access them from 2 directions (2 way) unlike a euro of chep which you can access from all 4 sides (some people refer to them as 4 way pallets because of this)
I’m guessing you might be doing pallet network multi drop if you’re class 2 and using all various pallet types so the other thing you’ll regularly come across is IBC’s or Industrial Bulk Containers. These are generally the same dimensions as a standard pallet and 120cm tall.
As for what a cube is, there’s many different things this could refer to and is something you should ask your work. There’s no such thing as a stupid question and there interpretation of what they think it is may be different to someone else’s.
As regards the standard pallet,some companies will not accept ’ Chep ’ pallets. All this means usually is that they only accept ’ white ’ pallets. Still the standard size but some refer to them as ’ white '. Lots of companies have guys who come round to their yards and purchase the inevitable build up of pallets as not all companies send out as many pallets as they receive. I think its about £2 ea for a decent 4-way standard white pallet.
We have a customer who wants it the other way round. Anything loaded onto a standard white pallet gets rejected. Must be either yard space or a pallet rental agreement with Chep.
Hello there, regarding “cubes”, it is just the size of the pallet in cubic metres (also called CBM or M3 on paperwork). To get the cube you multiply the 3 dimensions of the pallet together, so for example, a pallet which is 120 x 100 x 100 cms (length, width, height) would be 1.20 CBM (or 1.2 “cubes”) - 1.2 x 1 x 1 = 1.2. A euro pallet which is say 125 cms high would also be 1.20 cbm (1.2 x 0.8 x 1.25 = 1.2). In the UK we have the standard pallet base (which is 120 x 100 cms) and then there is the Euro pallet (which is 120 x 80 cms). So if you have a couple of standard pallets which are say 130 cms high that would be “about 3 cubes” (1.2 x 1 x 1.3 = 1.56 cbm, x 2 for 2 pallets is 3.12 cbm). Also just for general info a CHEP pallet is typically blue in colour and belongs to the company CHEP, and is mainly used by the supermarkets and large companies, which lease them from CHEP. Hope this is of use.
