A tightly laced tire stack can render your sprinkler system useless in a fire. The weight of the stack is already causing irreversible bead deformation on your bottom tiers, silently turning assets into liabilities. There is a safer, more efficient way to manage your tire inventory.
In the tire industry, traditional storage methods like lacing, weaving, or barrel stacking have long been the default for maximizing floor space. However, this perceived efficiency comes at a steep, often hidden, cost. It creates significant fire hazards, causes irreversible product damage, and results in severe operational bottlenecks.
Tires are composed of petroleum-based materials, creating a high fire load. When tires are laced together in dense, massive piles, they form a solid block of fuel. This configuration presents two critical dangers for fire suppression:
Beyond the fire risk, the immense pressure exerted in a traditional stack compromises the integrity of the tires themselves. The bottom layers bear the weight of hundreds or thousands of pounds, leading to costly defects:
The solution lies in shifting from a "product-bearing" to a "structure-bearing" storage model. Portable stack racks are engineered steel frames that create a self-supporting storage column, fundamentally changing the safety and efficiency equation.
The primary advantage of a steel tire storage rack system is its inherent compliance with modern fire safety standards. The open-frame construction directly mitigates the risks associated with bulk stacking.
The framework allows water from sprinkler systems to freely penetrate all levels of the stored tires, ensuring it can reach the seat of a potential fire. This open design also promotes air circulation, which helps dissipate heat and prevents the rapid temperature escalation seen in dense piles. This single feature is often the key to satisfying strict fire codes and insurance requirements.
With pallet stillages, each tire is supported by the steel structure, not by the tire below it. The weight of the upper racks is transferred directly to the floor through the robust vertical posts. This completely eliminates the compression forces that cause bead deformation and flat-spotting. Each tire, from the top of an 18-foot stack to the bottom, maintains its factory-perfect shape, ensuring 100% of your inventory remains saleable.
Metal racks transform your warehouse from a flat surface into a high-density storage cube. By safely stacking 4 or 5 units high, you can increase your storage capacity by up to 60% or more without expanding your facility's footprint. This standardized, modular approach brings order and efficiency to previously chaotic warehouses, allowing for clear aisles, better inventory visibility, and faster picking operations with a forklift.
The challenges of storage are amplified with heavy Truck and Bus Radial (TBR) tires. Our heavy duty stack racks are specifically engineered for this purpose, with reinforced bases and thicker gauge steel posts to handle load capacities exceeding 4,000 lbs. This ensures that even your largest and heaviest inventory is stored with the same level of safety and product protection as standard passenger tires.
Investing in a metal rack system is not just a capital expenditure; it's a strategic move towards a safer, more compliant, and more profitable operation. By eliminating product damage, preventing catastrophic fire risks, and maximizing every square foot of your warehouse, you build a more resilient supply chain from the ground up.
The primary benefit is the open-frame design. Unlike solid piles of tires, metal racks maintain flue spaces between stacks, allowing heat to vent and, most importantly, enabling water from overhead sprinklers to penetrate all levels of storage to extinguish a fire at its source. This is a key requirement in many fire codes for high-hazard commodities like tires.
Absolutely. Tire racks are not one-size-fits-all. They can be custom-designed based on your specific inventory mix. We design racks with different dimensions and load capacities, using a diameter-based algorithm to ensure a perfect fit for everything from small passenger car radials (PCR) to large, heavy truck and bus radials (TBR).
No, and that is one of their greatest advantages. They are portable stack racks, meaning they are not bolted to the floor. This gives you complete flexibility to reconfigure your warehouse layout to accommodate seasonal inventory fluctuations or changing operational needs. When not in use, the posts can be removed and the bases nested to save space.
Load capacity is tailored to the application. For standard passenger tires, a capacity of 2,200 lbs (approx. 1,000 kg) per rack is common. For heavy-duty applications like storing large agricultural or OTR tires, capacities can be engineered to exceed 4,000 lbs (approx. 1,800 kg).
The racks create a system of unitized loads. Instead of a random pile, you have discrete, moveable units (e.g., 16 tires per rack). This simplifies cycle counting to just counting racks, increasing inventory accuracy to over 99%. For picking, a forklift can directly access any specific rack (unit) without having to manually un-stack other tires, dramatically speeding up order fulfillment and reducing labor costs.
