Steel Racking for Sheet Storage

Herochu Steel Racking for Sheet Storage – Turn a Crowded Workshop into a High-Flow Cutting Hall

Picture a morning where the foreman no longer zig-zags between leaning stacks of plate, where every sheet is reachable in under a minute, and where the laser never waits for material. That scene is exactly what drove us to design the Herochu roll-out vertical system. Beginning at three thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a two-bay starter module, each rack is CE, UE and ISO 9001 certified and ships ready to lengthen, heighten or mobilise as work grows.

The concept is disarmingly simple: treat every plate like a drawer in a giant tool cabinet. A gas-assisted door drops level with the roller bed, a crank releases the lock, and sealed bearings glide the drawer out to full extension so an overhead crane or vacuum lifter can pick any sheet without disturbing the rest. Close the drawer, lift the door back into its structural position, and the aisle is clear again. One operator handles two-tonne steel as easily as pulling open a desk drawer.

Four starter footprints cover most plasma, laser and water-jet requirements. The smallest bay accepts two-metre by one-and-a-half-metre plate and carries six thousand kilos in six levels; the largest swallows six-metre by two-metre plate and still keeps each level inside the three-tonne limit. Storey height is set at two hundred and twenty millimetres as standard, yet arms relocate in fifty-millimetre increments so four-millimetre shim stock and forty-millimetre tool steel can live in the same rack.

Steel choice explains why these units outlive the building around them. Five-millimetre hot-rolled C-channel uprights are punched on a fifty-millimetre grid, then robot-welded to four-millimetre folded chassis plates. Induction-hardened guide rods, forty millimetres in diameter and case-hardened to fifty-five HRC, are rated for one hundred thousand cycles at full load. After shot-blasting to Sa 2.5, a sixty-micron zinc primer locks out corrosion and an eighty-micron traffic-blue top coat resists forklift scrapes and UV fade for years of outdoor storage.

Safety is woven through every detail. The load-bearing door is more than a shield; when closed it becomes a structural beam that adds twenty-five percent transverse rigidity. Each drawer locks automatically on closure, preventing accidental roll-out under forklift vibration. An earth strap runs from drawer to frame so static build-up never threatens polished aluminium or coated stock. Third-party testing under EN 13155 and EN 15635 confirms zero permanent deformation at one-and-a-quarter times rated load, and mill certificates are traceable by heat number for every steel coil we cut.

Installers like the system because it bolts together, never needing on-site welding. A forty-foot high-cube container carries twenty-two knock-down bays, and two technicians can assemble a six-bay row in half a shift. Adjustable footplates take up three-centimetre slab irregularities, so the rack can be repositioned when a new machine arrives or when the plant expands. Should the operation move to a larger hall, the entire structure unbolts and travels like oversized Meccano.

Return on investment arrives faster than most capital purchases. Labour saved by eliminating the two-man search-and-shuffle routine typically exceeds six thousand dollars a year in a single-shift shop. Scrap drops because plates are no longer dragged across one another, and every square metre of floor space released can be valued at local rental rates. Add the numbers together and a single heavy-duty bay usually pays for itself in under six months, after which the savings roll straight to the bottom line.

Custom work is routine rather than exceptional. Extra-deep drawers for two-and-a-half-metre wide plate, rubber-lined cradles for mirror-polished stainless, seismic cross-bracing for California or Christchurch, even motorised drives with pick-list touch screens have all left the same factory gate. Lead time for non-standard dimensions is typically fifteen days, and every modification is still covered by the same conformity declarations.

Support does not end when the bolts are torqued. A laser-etched QR code on each rack links to an online parts book, torque schedule and reorder form. Bearings, gas struts and rollers are stocked in Rotterdam, Houston and Singapore for forty-eight-hour delivery anywhere on the planet, and an annual load-test audit can be arranged to keep ISO 45001 inspectors satisfied.

The real payoff, however, is intangible: the quiet that falls over the shop when metal is no longer the bottleneck. Laser programmers stop arguing with forklift drivers, estimators quote shorter lead times, and the high-bay crane goes back to lifting machines instead of playing hide-and-seek with inventory. That calm is what Herochu delivers—one drawer at a time.