Ask a carrier what damages freight and you will hear about potholes and hard braking. Ask a claims adjuster and you will hear about voids. A load that cannot move does not get damaged; a load with eighteen inches of free space at the nose of the trailer will find a way to use it.
The three jobs dunnage does
First, it fills voids so nothing accelerates relative to the trailer. Second, it spreads point loads — a length of two-by-four across the top of a drum cluster stops the next tier concentrating weight on four small circles. Third, it separates incompatible items so they cannot abrade each other.
All three are structural functions, and all three are routinely performed with whatever offcut happens to be lying on the dock.
Why cut-to-length matters
Dunnage that is slightly too short does nothing; dunnage that is slightly too long bows and then does nothing. A measured, cut-to-length pack costs very little and works every time, which is why we cut it specifically from boards too short to make a deck — material that would otherwise go to the grinder.
- Measure your common voids once and order dunnage packs to those lengths.
- Brace at the nose and the doors; the middle of a trailer is rarely where loads fail.
- Use timber across the top of round or irregular items before stacking on them.
- For export, dunnage is in ISPM-15 scope and must be treated and marked.
- Keep a bin of cut lengths at the dock. Nobody walks across a yard for a brace.
The export trap worth repeating
A compliant pallet load with an untreated piece of bracing inside the container is a non-compliant consignment. We have seen it hold freight more than once, always because somebody grabbed a convenient offcut at the last minute. Treated dunnage costs almost the same and ships without an argument.
A test you can run on your own dock
Load as usual, then push firmly against the top nose corner of the load. If it moves, it will move at sixty miles an hour with far more energy. Add bracing until it does not. That is the whole specification.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on April 15, 2025. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- April 15, 2025
- Category
- Logistics
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “Dunnage, bracing and the art of a load that does not move”, Repallet Shop, April 15, 2025. repalletshop.com/blog/dunnage-and-bracing