Imagine you’re moving across the country to start a new job, stress surrounding the new opportunity and move begin to consume you. You’ve arrived to your new home and open your cardboard boxes to find some of your most prized possessions shattered and destroyed from the journey. Or imagine you’re a craftsman who has just sent out a product for a client after months of creating and refining the piece. The client calls days later to tell you the piece arrived broken, all your hard work crumbled. Or maybe you’re a shipping company that is struggling to make a profit because more often than not you’re having to pay for the cost of broken items. In a majority of these cases, crisis could’ve been avoided if wooden crates were considered for the job. In this article we will review when and why wooden crates are your best bet.

Shipping crates have been used for centuries to ship valuables over land and sea. Wooden crates offer consumers superior protection when compared to cardboard or plastic alternatives. Crates have been gaining popularity since their existence, but what materials are the most popular when making shipping crates?

Crates and pallets are designed to protect valuable cargo in transit. When they’re built using quality fasteners, like SCRAIL®, it seems a shame to just destroy them after they’ve reached their destination. Finding new life in traditionally discarded items is extremely popular these days. Here are seven ideas on how to repurpose crating and shipping materials instead of throwing them away.

In February of 1964, the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service published an extensive design manual for Wood Crates. The detailed publication sold for $.70 a copy, and was written by engineers at the University of Wisconsin's Forest Products Laboratory. The researchers identified that "the most important materials used in constructing crates are wood in its various forms and the fasteners used for fabrication and assembly. Sound crate design criteria and proper use of materials will result in a crate that combines maximum strength with minimum materials." Fifty-three years later, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Where to start, where to start?  So many business books, lecture series, and online seminars exist offering secrets and takeaways to surviving in competitive markets.  This could easily turn into a bullet list of suggestions, but we would rather offer a secret that your competitors may not even know about just yet!

Humans feel an innate desire to be out in nature, especially after a long winter hiding indoors. Warm weather brings with it the chance to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Like all creatures and plants, the sun gives us energy and lifts our spirits. But we also have grown accustomed to the amenities of modern living. We don’t just want to sit in the yard so we developed a way to bring the inside to the outside with decks!

New Coarse Thread Crating SCRAIL® fasteners are the latest innovation from the BECK Fastener Group®, designed to help crate manufacturers save labor costs while improving quality and customer satisfaction.

Like BECK’s other SCRAIL® products that are known for their holding power and speed of installation, Crating SCRAIL® fasteners are a combination of a nail and a screw - threaded collated fasteners for installation with a pneumatic nail gun tool.

The added features of Crating SCRAIL® that make them the best choice for use in crating are:

• Coarse threads ensure easier and more consistent removal for dismantling crates, and are especially well suited to crates constructed of soft wood varieties
• Use of plastic rope for collation makes it safer, since there is no wire flagging around the heads or sticking underneath them
• Plastic rope collation also retains its coil shape better than wire, which means coils can be reused if dropped, eliminating waste
• These fasteners can be used in most common 15° wire coil nailers on the market, so there are no special tools required

Brett McCutcheon, General Manager of FASCO America®, Master Distributor for the BECK Fastener Group®, commented, "We are excited to offer a SCRAIL® product specific to the needs of crating manufacturers. We took our successful SCRAIL® product and added features to create these coarsely threaded Crating SCRAIL® which allows crating manufacturers to more effectively and efficiently build and dismantle crates.”

FASCO America® is the Master Distributor for products manufactured by The BECK Fastener Group®, a leader in pneumatic tool and fastener development. For over 100 years, the BECK Fastener Group® has been a company focused on creating innovative, high quality products that generate time savings for the professionals who use their products.

A wooden crate can provide a great option for shipping fragile goods because when built properly, it is highly resistant to being damaged the way that cardboard and plastic shipping containers can be. Wooden crates were once very expensive to construct and use, but today they are a good solution for affordable and efficient packaging when constructed properly.

The crating industry is a unique one. It is an industry based on problem solving and critical thinking, where you need to decide what the best way is to get a thing, or hundreds of things, from point A to point B. There are many decisions to be made for every job including selection of crating materials, packaging materials, modes of transportation, and more. Here we focus on 5 companies doing crating in a new or better way. 

As the world economy continues to grow, and ecommerce has removed boundaries on where people shop, the need for manufacturers and sellers to concentrate on the right shipping containers has increased. Due to the complexity in size and quantity of shipping goods worldwide, more companies are turning to crating as a packaging option.