Collars
One of the most useful pallet accessories is the folding steel-hinged pallet collar. These are mostly made from solid timber or plywood and because of stacking and goods protection requirements the strength, safety, and compatible dimensions of the steel and wood components are important.
Folding Pallet Collar
Sweden was the innovator of collar use and design and in 1996 submitted its National Standard SS 842021 to form the basis of a new European standard. At the outset PalletLink formed a technical committee to feed test results into CEN and this comprised European collar makers, hinge makers, plywood development interests, the UK Defence Service (MoD) and Chep Europe.
A range of commercial collars were load tested to determine the potential effect of such a standard on current Swedish and European designs. From the test results it was clear that the standard was too tough for the constructions widely used, almost all collars were failing the tests. It was also found that many collars had progressively suffered weakening through uncontrolled reduced steel hinge thickness and also reduced plywood thickness. The CEN Committee made these compromise modifications -
a) The introduction of an EN Light Duty Collar with a 50% lower test load
b) Simplification of the Compression test making it safer for labs to undertake
Once these changes were made, the draft became a Standard in all European (CEN) countries and it was published as EN 13545: 2002 Pallet superstructures - pallet collars - test methods & performance requirements.
Further tests show a surprising number of commercial designs of collar still fail even to the lower EN Light Duty Collar requirements, it would seem then that by and large, buyers are satisfied with a shorter life semi-disposable collar.
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19c Pallet sizes in world trade - International, national and commercial. (PDF 106kb)20a An introduction to pallet collars-2 (PDF 88kb)20c Results of testing 4 and 6 hinge pallet collars. (PDF 13kb)74b Plywood, waferboard, chipboard and plastic mouldings in collar manufacture. (PDF 79kb)