I recall in the 70′s watching Sir Lancelot Spratt played by the late great James Robertson Justice in one of the series of the ‘Doctor’ films explaining to Dirk Bogarde and Leslie Phillips how to make an incision and then in his great booming voice exclaiming “that’s not an incision” and as he took control of the knife he opened up the patient from side to side exclaiming ‘that’s an incision, now we can see what is going on”. They may not have been the exact words but that was the overall portrayal of how to start surgery…. in those days none of your keyhole stuff, it was also the film with the famous line in it “what’s the bleeding time” but you have to have seen the film to appreciate the humour that followed that question.

So here we are in the new millennium and we have unravelled the mysteries of DNA, we are making amazing inroads into key hole surgery and materials are getting lighter and more economical in their use through our engineering ingenuity of how to make less more.

I think we have a way to go in making mild steel perform as well when it is only 0.5mm thick as opposed to 2.5mm thick and you can dress it up any way you like but when it is paper thin I would argue that it is no longer of industrial quality. Having started life in a blacksmith’s shop, under the watchful eye of the 6ft 6in, 18 stone, 86 year old blacksmith who trained me, I can tell you he would have put no credibility in a shelf that was made up of 0.5mm thick material.

However profiling does have its advantages even though it does have its limitations. For example if you take a brand new ten pound note and fold it neatly left to right as you look at it, either in concertina or box format, it is possible to place a beer mat on top of it and with sufficient creases you can then stand a pint of beer on top of this which is approximately two pounds in weight – quite an achievement for a piece of paper probably less than 0.2mm thick so it shows that at least in one direction sensible profiling does produce enormous vertical loading properties and of course if you make these materials in steel, you can imagine the effect this has.

However take your profile and turn it through ninety degrees, as in your ten pound note, and anything larger than a match stick in weight is going to cause it to deflect and in comparison with our earlier experiment the strength in the rotation of the design has sapped away to virtually zero. This means when you inter-connect the horizontal structures with the vertical structures the material will give and deflect and this is easy to test with the structure if you exert sideways pressure on it. This may be acceptable for a domestic application but in my opinion it is not fit for purpose for industrial applications. Commercial and industrial shelving should have minimal sideways deflections and there should be a solid feel to the erected structure with minimal movement. It is simply not just about vertical loadings, stability of the individual bay is significant to commercial and industrial applications.

I see many products on the internet today advertised as industrial shelving from ¬£25.00 and in the words of Sir Lancelot Spratt I would exclaim “that’s not industrial shelving”.

For very light applications and domestic applications, thinner materials can be acceptable. The principal difference is that in your own home you are not likely to stand on it, overload it, abuse it or let the children play on it. In stark contrast even industrial strength steel shelving with 1 to 1.5mm thick shelves I have frequently seen it bent virtually double due to abuse.

Therefore my conclusion is that products ought to be built to environments and not simply to cost and that cost on its own is meaningless and there is too much emphasis on providing the cheapest piece of equipment. The cheapest piece of equipment is the one that you buy once and is still doing the job 20 years later and only looking 2 or 3 years old. I wish I could say the same about myself!

Above you can see some of the thin profiled materials. By folding and reforming 0.5mm of steel, you can provide some very strong structures. However you will never provide the same strength and low deflection qualities of 2.5mm of mild steel re-inforced with an underbrace of a further 2.5mm which is the equivalent of 5mm of metal supporting the job as opposed to 1mm of metal maximum and 1.35mm with some imaginative profiling. Armed with this information, you should be able to make some productive decisions on what sort of shelving is really going to perform best in your business.

The industry has a duty of care to define these structures clearly to the unwary buyer and I personally do not think anything that you can buy for ¬£25.00 should also include the word ‘industrial’. In my opinion it simply isn’t.