Stop the bottleneck at your IGU line. Scratched Low-E coatings and mismatched lites during the "pairing" process are costing your fabrication plant thousands in remakes and downtime. A specialized Warehouse Glass Sorting Cart isn't just storage—it's the critical buffer that organizes your flow from the cutting table to the washer.
Talk With An ExpertIn high-volume glass fabrication, the zone between the CNC cutting table and the tempering furnace (or IGU line) is often where efficiency dies. Operators waste valuable minutes searching for the matching lite to complete a double-pane unit, or worse, they pull a sheet only to find the soft-coat Low-E surface has been scratched by leaning against another rough edge.
The Harp Glass Rack (often called a "Harp Cart" or "H-Rack") is engineered specifically to solve this sortation crisis. Unlike A-frames which are designed for bulk transport, the Harp Rack is a high-density sorting tool. It isolates every single lite, ensuring zero contact between glass surfaces and allowing instant visual identification of any slot.
Figure 1: High-density sorting prevents surface contact and simplifies IGU pairing.
A standard metal rack is the enemy of architectural glass. To handle processed glass—especially units destined for tempering or laminating—the contact points must be softer than the glass itself but durable enough for industrial abuse.
Sliding a heavy 12mm laminated sheet or a large oversized unit into a slot requires significant force. If the base provides too much friction, operators will struggle, leading to back injuries or dropped glass.
Our Warehouse Glass Sorting Cart features a base lined with high-durability Nylon Rollers. These rollers reduce the friction coefficient to near zero, allowing a single operator to glide heavy glass sheets into the rack with one hand. Furthermore, the base is often numbered (1-40 or 1-60), allowing the cutting table software to assign a specific slot to a specific lite, synchronizing perfectly with your production software.
Figure 2: Numbered Nylon rollers allow for precise inventory tracking and effortless loading.
The vertical separators are what give the "Harp Rack" its name. We utilize steel rods for structural rigidity—ensuring they don't bend under the weight of leaning glass—but they are fully encased in a thick PVC casing. This creates a non-marring barrier. Even if the glass impacts the divider during loading, the PVC absorbs the shock, preventing edge shelling or surface scratches on delicate coated glass.
A static rack is useful, but a mobile buffer is transformative. These carts are designed to move batches of glass from the cutting/seaming station directly to the furnace or washer.
However, mobility introduces risk. A loaded cart carrying 2,000 lbs of glass must not move when being loaded. We integrate a specialized Foot-Actuated Lifting Mechanism (floor lock). Unlike simple wheel brakes which can slip, this mechanism slightly elevates the rack or drives a friction pad into the floor, immobilizing the unit completely. This ensures that when an operator pushes a heavy lite into the slot, the cart doesn't roll away, preventing catastrophic accidents.
Figure 3: Heavy-duty casters combined with floor locks ensure safe WIP transfer.
For glass fabricators, floor space is premium real estate. But shipping fully assembled steel racks is essentially paying to ship air. Our Harp Glass Rack systems feature a Knock-Down (KD) bolt-together design.
This allows us to flat-pack the units for transport, significantly reducing freight costs. Once they arrive at your facility, they can be assembled quickly using standard tools. This modularity also means that if a specific component (like a caster or a PVC rod) is damaged after years of heavy use, you can replace the single part rather than scrapping the entire rack.
Figure 4: Flat-pack delivery reduces your logistics costs without compromising structural integrity.
1. Can this rack handle heavy insulated glass units (IGUs) or just single lites?
While primarily designed for sorting single lites (monolithic or laminated) prior to assembly, we offer heavy-duty models with wider slot spacing specifically for storing cured IGUs. Please specify your glass thickness and unit depth requirements when ordering.
2. Will the nylon rollers scratch Soft-Coat Low-E glass?
No. The nylon material is softer than the glass substrate. However, standard practice for Low-E glass is to handle it on the edge or non-coated side. The rollers contact the bottom edge of the glass, not the face, ensuring the coating remains pristine for the washer.
3. What is the maximum weight capacity per cart?
Our standard Warehouse Glass Sorting Cart is rated for a dynamic load of 3,300 lbs (1,500 kg). For facilities processing jumbo sheets or thick ballistic glass, we can engineer reinforced bases with higher load ratings.
4. Can we customize the number of slots?
Yes. The standard configuration is typically 40 or 60 slots to align with standard batch sizes from cutting tables. However, as a direct manufacturer, we can adjust the pitch (spacing) of the PVC rods to accommodate thicker glass or increase the slot count for thinner glass batches.
5. How do you prevent "domino" breakage if a rod fails?
Our rods are made from solid steel cores, not hollow tubes. They are engineered to withstand the leaning weight of the glass without bending. Additionally, the "harp" design means each piece of glass is independently supported; if one piece breaks due to operator error, the dividers prevent it from falling onto and breaking adjacent lites.
