Your pallets keep breaking in the same place. Here is why.

What a notch does to a stringer

A stringer is a beam. Its resistance to bending goes up with the *square* of its depth, which is why a 3½-inch stringer is dramatically stiffer than a 2½-inch one rather than just 40% stiffer.

Now cut a notch. A standard GMA notch is 9 inches long and 1½ inches deep, taken out of the bottom edge. The stringer at that point is no longer 3½ inches deep; it is 2 inches deep. Square that relationship and the notched section has roughly a third of the bending resistance of the full section.

That would be tolerable if the notch were somewhere quiet. It is not. It sits under the load path, and it is exactly where a fork tine lands when a driver enters from the 40-inch side.

Why it fails when it fails

Wood does not usually fail suddenly under a static load it can carry. It fails from an accumulation of three things.

• Repeated bending. Each lift flexes the notched section. Wood fibres do not recover perfectly, and micro-checking accumulates along the grain.

• Impact. A fork entering at speed hits the notch shoulder. That is a shear load applied sideways to a section already reduced in depth.

• Moisture cycling. A pallet stored outdoors swells and shrinks. The notch is end grain on two faces, so it takes on and loses water faster than the rest of the stringer, and the differential movement opens splits.

The failure itself is almost always a split running from the notch corner along the grain toward the end of the stringer. Once that split exists, the pallet has effectively become a two-way pallet with a hinge in it.

The four fixes, cheapest first

1. Shorten the span

If the pallet is racked, the notch is bridging open air. Adding rack decking, wire mesh or a third front-to-back rail removes the bending problem entirely. This is almost always cheaper than upgrading every pallet in the fleet, and it fixes the deck sag at the same time.

2. Change the entry habit

If your drivers routinely enter from the 40-inch side because that is how the racking faces, you are loading the notch every single time. Where the layout permits entry from the 48-inch side, the forks pass under the stringers rather than through them, and the notch never sees the tine. This is a free fix and it is frequently available.

3. Deepen the stringer

A 4-inch stringer notched to the same depth retains substantially more section than a 3½-inch one. On a custom build this is a small material cost for a large strength gain, and it is the change we recommend most often for heavy repeat-use fleets.

4. Move to block construction

Nine blocks with perimeter runners have no notch at all — the fork enters between the blocks, through a gap rather than through a cut. Block pallets carry more, last longer under repeat handling and give true four-way entry. They also weigh more and cost more. For a fleet cycling dozens of times, they win.

What to do with the ones already cracked

A cracked stringer is repairable, once. A companion piece glued and nailed alongside the original along its full length restores most of the original strength, which is why a repaired pallet grades B rather than A.

What it does not survive is a second crack in a second stringer. At that point the pallet is beyond economical repair and goes to dismantling, where the deck boards and the uncracked stringer are recovered.

If you are seeing a high rate of notch failures on newly delivered stock, tell us. That is a specification conversation, not a warranty conversation, and it usually ends with a different pallet rather than a credit note.