Generally, customers can be broken down into 4 categories, one of these being to recover broken pallets or damaged goods at the bottom of a stack. It is fair to say that almost every inverter ever sold has at some time been used to give quick access to the bottom of the stack; many of them for only that purpose. Good housekeeping and better presentation to customers are two good reasons to have a pallet transfer device available at short notice when product starts to spill.

The biggest users of inverters are undoubtedly food and pharmaceutical companies who need to switch incoming goods from wooden to hygienic pallets for use in production areas. This principally applies to factories who manufacture products with a wide range of ingredients e.g. biscuits, cakes, snack foods, ready meals, health foods etc. Often the packaging material as well as the foodstuffs have to be transferred.

Hygiene is becoming increasingly critical and it is now out of the question for a wood pallet which could harbour any amount of chemicals or contamination from previous uses, to be allowed into a clean zone.

Any company that runs a high-bay warehouse or coldstore will be aware of the dangers of racking a broken or unstable pallet. Therefore, inverters are also used to guard against sub-standard pallets entering the system where they can cause delays or accidents.

The same hygiene and safety-conscious companies who employ an inverter on the incoming side of their operation may also use one for outgoing goods too.

Pharmaceutical products in particular are often palletised on plastic or other top quality skids in the factory but are switched to cheaper expendable pallets for distribution. A pallet transfer device gives the option to put goods on to the most suitable type of unit for distribution immediately prior to shipping. A producer may not know the destination of the goods at time of production, but now has the flexibility to transfer them to the most suitable pallet for the market concerned.

The fourth category of pallet inverter user is the company who simply needs to turn something through 180 degrees. There are many examples:

* Printers who need to print on both sides of the sheet of paper.
* Producers of laminated product such as MDF board.
* Cheese producers during the maturation process.
* Vineyards will allow the cork to expand in the neck of the bottles then turn them through 180 degrees for long term storage.
* Concrete sections can be inverted to remove the steel mould.
* Bananas are turned after ripening for better presentation in the supermarket.

Just when we think we have heard every reason for 180 degree inversion, our customers will come up with one more.

Inline conveyor fed: Premier’s latest project is to rationalise this process and produce a more simple and universal model with options to upgrade additional features.

Customers are also increasingly interested in conveyor-fed, fully automated pallet exchange systems. The ideal scenario in most warehouse keepers’ minds is that a pallet stack can simply be placed on the end of a conveyor and picked off at the other end on a new pallet. Of course, this is feasible, but the challenge for exchanger system designers is to do it at a justifiable price. Loads which can be exchanged once onto a new pallet are relatively easy to handle. However, when the load has to be re-inverted onto a new pallet the original way up, this involves a lot of extra movement and handling. Solutions are being found and Premier Pallet Systems maintain their pledge to stay at the forefront of this technology.

The earliest pallet inverters were usually referred to as load tippers or tipplers and were invariably put together in local workshops. 180 degree inverter attachments on forklift trucks were also developed early on, with Cascade’s Turnaload being among the first commercially available pallet inverters on the market. Attempts were made to mount these attachments onto fixed ‘A’ frames with very mixed results.

The earliest applications were with agriculture-based industries such as chemical fertiliser and animal feeds. The turnaloads were used to invert stacks of bagged goods through180 degrees. This was to recover damaged sacks and to switch loads to customer pallets.

The first recognizable free-standing pallet inverters was developed in Norfolk in around 1976. It was built using the hydraulics salvaged from a dustcart! The concept proved very popular with ICI Fertilisers who bought at least 60 rotators for their distribution stores and factories throughout the country. The use of the machines cut their pallet losses enormously and helped to contain spillages in the warehouse. More soon

Many coldstores were among the first companies to take up the idea. Broken or poor quality wood pallets present a significant danger if they are put away in the racking system. Frost on the steel racking has led to a number of serious accidents usually triggered by a damaged pallet.

The pallet inverters were sited off the edge of the loading dock so they could be accessed by the same powered pallet trucks which emptied the freezer trailers. Clearly a better solution would be a pallet changer which had a floor-level loading table. Hence the pallet retriever was designed to tip the load on its side and slide the load away by gravity enabling pallet exchange. Where the original pallet inverters were designed with a 2000 kgs capacity, the retriever was rarely required to handle over one tonne.

One further development was required to perfect the concept of pallet inversion. With most machines it was still necessary to remove the recovered pallets manually. Premier’s Pallet Changer takes things one stage further by loading at floor level, tipping the product on its side, then re-presenting the pallet back to the floor for removal. The cost of this system is relatively high in comparison to the still-popular simple FLT loaded models. However, it is an indication of the importance of the pallet inverter in most warehouses now, that it is a price many companies are prepared to pay.