The anatomy of a repair decision

The four inputs

Stringer condition

The dominant factor. One cracked stringer is a repair — a companion piece glued and nailed along its full length. Two cracked stringers, or one already carrying a previous repair, is a dismantle. The pallet has used up its structural allowance.

Deck board count

Below roughly 40% of boards needing replacement, repair is economical. Above it, you are rebuilding rather than repairing, and the labour exceeds the value of the finished Grade B pallet.

Contamination and condition

Rot, mold, delamination or chemical staining ends the conversation immediately, regardless of structure. These go past dismantling too — contaminated wood should not enter the lumber pool.

Footprint marketability

The one people find counterintuitive. A structurally sound pallet in a footprint nobody buys is worth more as recovered lumber than as a pallet occupying yard space indefinitely.

What a repair actually costs

The material is trivial — a deck board and a handful of fasteners. Labour dominates, and it is not linear.

Replacing one deck board is a fast, standard operation. Fitting a companion stringer takes considerably longer: the crack must be assessed, the companion cut to length, glued, clamped and nailed. Plugging a damaged stringer end around the notch is longer still and is the repair most often done badly elsewhere.

So the threshold is not really about how broken the pallet is. It is about how many *minutes* of skilled labour the finished Grade B pallet can justify. That number moves with the market: when reclaimed stock is scarce and prices firm, repairs that were marginal become worthwhile.

Why the line has to be honest

There is a constant commercial temptation to move the line outward — to repair marginal pallets, grade them B, and ship them. Every one of those is revenue that would otherwise be lumber.

It is also how a yard destroys its reputation, slowly. Marginal repairs fail in a customer's building, not in ours. The customer does not conclude 'that was a marginal repair'; they conclude 'their Grade B is unreliable'. And they are right, because a grade is a promise about a population, not about one pallet.

So the thresholds are written down, the repair standards are specific — full-length boards not offcuts, glue and nails not staples, fasteners pulled not hammered — and repaired pallets grade B, never A. See pallet grades.

What this means if you own a fleet

If you run a captive fleet or a custom design, the same thresholds apply and the economics are more favourable, because replacement means a production run rather than pulling another pallet off a stack.

We assess and quote by repair category rather than by the hour — deck board replacement, companion stringer, end plug, fastener remediation. That breakdown is genuinely useful beyond the invoice: it tells you where damage is concentrated, and damage concentrated in one category usually points at a handling problem rather than a pallet problem.

Fleets showing heavy notch damage almost always have a fork entry issue. Fleets showing deck board loss usually have a fastener specification issue. Both are fixable at source, which is worth more than the repairs.

Details on pallet repair and refurbishing.