What Is A Sacrificial Leg And Can It Save Money On Shelving?

Whilst there is a wide assortment of industrial storage shelves available on the market suitable for most industrial and high-density logistics purposes, with bespoke solutions available to cater to the rest.

The modern warehouse, designed around the trinity of the forklift, the standardised pallet and adjustable high-density racking, allows for increasingly heavy goods to be stored quickly up to the heavens in narrow aisles to maximise the efficiency of utilised space.

However, as the expected speed and efficiency of operations in a warehouse increase, the smaller the margin of error becomes, and the risk and impact of an accident increase alongside it.

To avoid dangerous and costly accidents one solution found with heavy-duty shelving is sacrificial legs, but how do they work and how can they save a company money?

Protective Redundancy

Aside from the differences in load capacity and some design elements, shelving fundamentally consists of vertical uprights and horizontal beams, which are connected to each other in various ways to allow loads to be placed and later picked.

The weight is carefully and delicately spread across the uprights to ensure that they are not overladen and therefore will not in normal conditions buckle and break under the weight. If an upright breaks, it could potentially cause the entire racking unit to fall over, with consequences that range from merely terrible to catastrophic.

This is a particular concern for rack shelving because forklifts are heavier and more difficult to manoeuvre than people picking and packing on foot.

This means that the lowermost metre of the upright is at risk of being bumped or crashed into, which typically means a complete stop of work to unload the run of shelving for safety reasons.

A sacrificial leg, true to its name, provides protective redundancy as a protective shielded element bolted to the front of the upright. 

This element provides protection similar to a crumple zone, in the sense that it absorbs and displaces the impact and means that the structural, load-bearing upright element is protected from harm.

Once it has suffered an impact, it can be removed and replaced with a new sacrificial leg section without having to do anything to the rest of the frame itself.

This saves money in two critical ways. The first and most obvious is that it prevents damage to the shelving upright itself, and given that the sacrificial leg is smaller it requires less metal to make and is therefore cheaper.

The other important factor to consider is how much it saves money by saving time. Replacing an entire run of industrial shelving is extremely time-consuming as it involves carefully unloading everything on the rack, moving the rack out of the main warehouse area and installing a new unit of shelving.

During this time, a section of the warehouse is effectively off-limits, and given how efficient modern supply chain logistics are, this can have a domino effect that leads to further slowdowns at the end of the chain, losing money for a business.

Contrast this with the relative ease of unbolting a sacrificial leg and fitting a new one, which is a task that can take far less time by comparison.

For more information on What Is A Sacrificial Leg And Can It Save Money On Shelving? talk to UK Shelving Ltd