How Can Grooved Wood Keep Your Shipments Safe?

If you’re a manufacturer, you know that keeping your shipments safe is a top priority – that’s why so many used grooved wood. Although it may seem like a super simple solution, grooved wood can protect your shipments from bumps, scratches, and even top loads in semi-trucks.

How can a few pieces of wood protect a pallet load of product? Well, let’s talk about it! To understand how grooved wood can protect your shipments, we’ll cover what it is exactly, how it protects your products, and how popular this wood product is across manufacturing, transportation, and many other industries.

It’s worth addressing, grooved wood is a product known by many names… You may know it as banding groove. Grooved wood, or banding groove, is a small wood product that is used to secure the top or sides of pallet loads of product – making it a form of dunnage. Lumber manufacturers create this product using industrial lumber. Using grade 3 or 4 softwood industrial lumber, manufacturers cut lumber down to size to make grooved wood. Using industrial lumber, manufacturers can make grooved wood cost-effective without losing any strength.

These small pieces of wood measure roughly three inches across and 40 inches long. With these dimensions, manufacturers can place 3 to 5 pieces of wood across the top of a pallet load. The amount of this dunnage used depends entirely upon the level of security the user wants the package to have. Manufacturers typically order grooved wood by the pallet load. Since they use multiple pieces of grooved wood per pallet, the decision to buy in-bulk makes sense!

When talking about grooved wood, you can’t help but mention pressure and surface area. It’s by these two processes that grooved wood does its job.

Just like when stacking a Jenga tower, there needs to be the right combination of pressure and surface area to keep shipments secure. If shipments aren’t secure, it might not look as dramatic as tumbling blocks all over the place, but it can cost you time and money because of in-transit damage.

Pressure is applied to the dunnage by metal or plastic strapping, the decision to use either is completely dependent on you. These straps are placed along the grooves of the wood and are secured at the bottom of the pallet. This creates the pressure needed for the grooved wood to be effective at holding everything together.

Like we mentioned earlier, surface area is also needed so grooved wood can be effective. We could show you the math with this, but we know you don’t want that… You just want your packages to be secured!

With each piece of grooved wood that you add, more surface area between the package is created. If you’re looking to add a little safeguard to your package, 3 pieces of grooved wood will do the trick. On the other hand, if you believe that the way your package has been put together is unstable, or your product is fragile, 5 pieces of grooved wood will do the trick. With each piece of grooved wood you add, the more secure your package becomes.

All of this being said, grooved wood can substantially increase the security of your shipments!

The popularity of grooved wood as dunnage lumber is seen all across the nation. In millions of warehouses, manufacturing centers, and transportation hubs, this spectacular type of dunnage is used to secure packages ranging from construction equipment all the way down to valuable electronics.

One of the reasons grooved wood is so popular is because of its lifespan. Grooved wood doesn’t have a defined life span because its degradation is primarily based on damage. If a package takes a fall or other form of damage, there’s the possibility that the grooved wood could lose its strength, or possibly be broken. This would cut the life short of the grooved wood, but it would definitely help to protect and secure your shipment.

Other than suffering damage in an accident, the life span of grooved wood is as long as it’s still structurally sound.

Grooved wood can be a lifesaver in the manufacturing industry. After all, what’s more important than protecting your products? Now that we’ve covered what grooved wood is, how it protects your packages, and why it’s so popular, we hope that you leave this article feeling confident in its abilities! At Conner, our biggest priority with any of our integrated packaging products is the safety of your shipments – we put our stamp of approval on grooved wood to do that job at an exceedingly high level.