Customized Vertical Sheet Metal Storage Rack by Herochu | Starting at $5,199
Walk into any fabrication shop that’s been around more than five years and you’ll find it—the sheet metal graveyard. Stacks of 4×8 remnants leaning against walls. A 6-foot scrap of 11-gauge tucked behind the shear. Half a sheet of stainless under the workbench. Nobody knows what it is, nobody wants to chuck it, and everybody’s terrified it’ll tumble onto someone’s foot. This isn’t just clutter. It’s capital tied up in corroding inventory, it’s lost floor space, and it’s an OSHA report waiting for a signature.
Herochu’s customized vertical sheet metal storage rack doesn’t organize this chaos—it eliminates the conditions that create it. Starting at $5,199, this pull-out vertical sheet metal rack treats your remnants, semi-finished panels, and cut-to-size pieces as assets worth protecting, not debris to dodge. And because we’re a China manufacturer of sheet metal racks that actually engineers solutions instead of stamping out SKUs, “customized” isn’t an upcharge. It’s the default.
The Scrap Problem Nobody Talks About
Let’s get specific. A 3000×1500mm sheet of 5mm mild steel weighs 176 kilograms. Cut two panels out of it and you’re left with a 1200mm remnant that still weighs 70 kilograms. Too heavy to hang on a pegboard, too awkward to stack flat without risking a domino effect. So it leans. Then someone leans another against it. Then a third. Six months later you have a 37-degree tower of mystery metal occupying four square meters of rent-paying floor space.
Our vertical sheet metal rack solves this by giving every piece—even the weird ones—a dedicated slot. The sliding design means each compartment pulls out fully, presenting the material at a 3-degree slant that uses gravity to keep sheets stable while making them visible. That 3-degree angle isn’t arbitrary. It’s the sweet spot that prevents forward slip during drawer movement but allows easy retrieval with a hoist or even manual handling for lighter gauges. Try that with a vertical storage bin that drops sheets flat. You’ll be fishing them out with a pry bar.
Engineering the 400kg Slot (And Why It Matters)
Each slot in our standard configuration handles 400 kilograms. That’s 880 pounds of steel, aluminum, or whatever alloy you’re cutting. But here’s what the spec sheet doesn’t tell you: that capacity is distributed across a 2440×1220mm or 3000×1500mm surface using eight polyurethane-coated rollers per drawer. The load isn’t concentrated on flimsy ball bearings that flatten under pressure. It’s spread across a beam deflection profile that keeps the drawer level within 1.5mm, even at full extension.
The “100% extension” feature sounds like a given until you’ve used a rack that only extends 80% and you’re trying to reach the back edge of a 4000mm sheet. Our drawers pull clear of the frame. Every millimeter is accessible. This matters because sheet metal storage isn’t about cramming stuff into a box—it’s about retrieval without drama. When you’re pulling a remnant for a rush job at 4:47 PM, you don’t want to play Jenga.
For shops running heavier stock, we can customize up to 600 kilograms per slot. That means a single drawer can hold a 4000×2000mm sheet of 10mm steel and still slide out with two fingers of push. The mechanical operation system—yes, mechanical, not motorized—is intentional. No motor means no motor failure. No control boards to fry in a weld-shop environment. No waiting for a drive system to wake up. Push, pull, done. Simplicity is a feature, not a compromise.
Single-Person Operation: The Labor Math
Safety officers love to talk about two-person lifts. Payroll managers hate them. In a market where a certified welder costs $30 an hour, every job that requires a spotter doubles your labor cost. Herochu’s vertical sliding sheet metal rack is designed so one person—one—can manage material from storage to machine.
The drawer height is adjustable from 150mm spacing (for thin sheets and smaller cut pieces) to 180mm or more for palletized loads. This puts material at ergonomic height. Pull the drawer, hook up your vacuum lifter or magnetic hoist, and transfer directly to the laser bed or shear. No second set of hands needed. No one standing underneath a swinging load “just in case.”
The mechanical operation plays into this. A drawer loaded with 400 kilograms moves with less than 15 kilograms of pull force thanks to our roller geometry. That means an operator wearing leather gloves can manage it without strain. The 3-degree slant keeps the sheet stable during the pull, so they’re not fighting gravity and momentum simultaneously. We’ve seen shops redeploy one full-time material handler per shift after installing these racks. That’s a $60,000 annual savings that pays for the unit before the warranty expires.
Customization That Actually Fits Your Workshop
“Customizable” gets thrown around so much it’s lost meaning. For Herochu, it means we start with your sheet size and work backward. The table shows popular sizes of 2440×1220mm and 3000×1500mm. But we regularly build for 4000×2000mm sheets—the kind that don’t fit in standard anything. We configure drawer counts from 2 to 10 based on your material mix. Running a job shop with eight active gauges? Eight drawers. Managing a high-mix backlog? Ten slots with 110mm spacing lets you segregate by job number.
Color matters more than you’d think. Blue/orange is standard because it’s visible in a busy shop, but we match RAL codes for facilities running 5S visual management. White drawers for aluminum, gray for steel, yellow for stainless—makes training new hires trivial. “Grab the yellow drawer, second from the bottom.” Done.
Movement style is where we really diverge from cookie-cutter designs. Most vertical racks only pull front-to-back. We offer left-right sliding configurations for shops where aisle width is constrained or where the rack sits between two work centers. Imagine a double-sided setup serving both a shear and a press brake from the same unit. The operator pulls the drawer toward whichever machine needs material. That’s space efficiency at the architectural level.
The Mechanical Advantage (And Why We Skipped Motors)
You might wonder why a base price of $5,199 doesn’t include a motor. Simple. Motors break. They draw power. They add complexity where none is needed. Our mechanical system is a study in applied leverage: precision-ground rails, polymer rollers with sealed bearings, and a damper that prevents drawers from slamming shut.
In a weld shop environment—dust, grinding grit, magnetic particles—a motorized rack’s exposed screw drive or belt system becomes a maintenance nightmare. Our mechanical drawers? Hose them down. Literally. The bearings are sealed. The rails are self-clearing. A shot of WD-40 every quarter and you’re golden. And because there’s no 220V supply needed, you can position the rack anywhere. No electrician required.
This reliability is why our China-manufactured racks carry CE, UE, and ISO 9001 certifications. The CE mark means we’ve met EU Machinery Directive requirements for stability and loading, including overload testing at 125% rated capacity. UE certification—a regional standard more stringent than many international norms—validates our welding procedures and material traceability. ISO 9001 ensures every unit ships with a quality file: mill certs for the steel, weld inspection reports, and load test documentation. When your customer audits your facility, this rack won’t be a liability.
Specs You Can Actually Use
Here’s the data that matters for planning:
- Storage Sheet Size: 2440×1220mm (standard), 3000×1500mm (popular), or customized up to 4000×2000mm. We build to your max sheet size plus 50mm clearance.
- Loading per Slot: 400kg standard, ≤600kg customizable. The limiting factor is roller capacity, not frame strength. We’ve tested to 800kg for specialized applications.
- Number of Drawers: 2–10 available. Seven is the most common, giving you six active slots plus a base level for storing dunnage or empty pallets.
- Layer Spacing: 150mm standard, 180mm for thicker material or pallet storage. Custom spacing in 10mm increments. The distance depends on your sheet height and whether you store on pallets.
- Operation System: Mechanical. Smooth pull-out with integrated dampers.
- Color: Blue/white or blue/orange standard. Custom RAL colors available.
- Safety Slant: 3 degrees, built into the drawer frame. Not an add-on.
ROI: Floor Space and Frustration
Crunch the numbers. A horizontal stack of 10 sheets, 3000mm long, needs 4.5 square meters. Our vertical rack with 8 drawers stores 80 sheets in 1.2 square meters. At $150 per square meter annually for industrial space, you’re saving $495 per year per rack in real estate alone. But the real payback comes in time.
An operator retrieving a specific remnant from a disorganized stack averages 8 minutes. From our rack: 45 seconds. That’s a 7.25-minute savings per pull. Twenty pulls daily equals 145 minutes—over two hours of recovered labor. At $30/hour loaded cost, that’s $72.50 per day, $18,850 per year. The rack pays for itself in under four months.
And that’s before you factor in the unquantifiable: morale. Nobody wants to wrestle scraps at 7 AM. A clean shop where materials are accessible and organized attracts better talent and keeps them longer.
The Herochu Difference: We Build for Remnants, Not Just Full Sheets
Most rack manufacturers focus on pristine, full-size sheets. We design for the messy reality of fabrication: the oddball cutouts, the 600mm strip left from a nest, the semi-finished panels waiting for secondary ops. That’s why our vertical sliding sheet metal rack system uses slots instead of shelves. Each slot acts like a file folder, keeping pieces separated and identifiable.
Pair this with our roll-out sheet metal rack line for full-size stock, and you have a complete material handling ecosystem: full sheets stored horizontally in motorized units, remnants managed vertically in sliding racks. The same shop-floor logic applies—easy access, single-person operation, and a place for everything.
The $5,199 starting price includes standard sizing, mechanical operation, and your choice of blue/orange or blue/white finish. It ships containerized, 85% assembled. Two workers can have it operational in three hours with basic hand tools. No pit to dig, no slab to pour, no permits to pull. It’s the simplest major productivity upgrade you’ll make this year.
Herochu: China Manufacturer of Sheet Metal Racks
CE, UE, ISO 9001 Certified | Customized Steel Storage Solutions
Contact us for a slot layout consultation and discover why fabricators in 40+ countries trust our vertical sheet metal storage systems.
