Full truckload shipping

Hi all!

For folks doing scrap as more than a hobby and hoping to scale up their business thought I'd post some basics on full truckload and container freight shipping. For organizing freight shipping I'mmmmmm not your guy lol. Luckily there is a forum member who is! Check the buyer/seller section for a very well reviewed provider of freight services. But I do ship and receive multiple full truckloads of scrap every week as well as a few containers monthly. So here's the basics.

For highway freight your standard trailer is between 48-53' long. Some carriers also offer 28' trailers. Depending on the weight of the cab your maximum allowable freight load will almost never exceed 45,000lbs in order to stay under the 80,000lb interstate limit. On average, a full truckload by weight is gonna be 43,000-44,000lbs. Some states have higher allowable intrastate limits but if the vehicle is traveling over an interstate highway its maximum weight will be 80,000lbs. In theory if the trucks' empty weight is 32,000lbs then your load could be 48,000lbs but it becomes very difficult to properly axle the truck (you can only have so much weight per axle) at that weight.

By space instead of weight, the maximum amount of standard gaylords (48x40x36") on pallets is 44 for a 48' trailer and 48 on a 53'. In theory you can have a couple more but that is only if each is stackable and fits without overhang on a standard 48x40" pallet. In practice that is pretty much never the case. Gaylords can be too weak to stack or bulging over the pallet or not centered on the pallet and so on.

A full truckload by space dimensions doesn't mean it will be full by weight. A standard gaylord of Al/Cu radiator ends won't be much more than 600lbs, and office phones closer to 450lbs. A full truckload of nothing but 450lb gaylords isn't even gonna be 20,000lbs total. This means your price per pound for full truckload freight is gonna be higher than if you shipped 40,000+ lbs. For example if you're shipping a 43,000lbs of something a few hundred miles for $850 you're spending about .019/lb on shipping. But a full truckload at that same price that weighs 19,800lbs would be a little under .043/lb. So if you bought something at .05/lb and sell it al .10/lb, you could absorb that .019/lb shipping and still make about $1300. (43000 x .05= $2150, 43000 x .10= $4300. 4300-2150=$2150. $2150-850= $1300). But at 19,800lbs this total profit drops down to $140. $1300 can justify quite a bit of time to collect and organize and load the material. $140 much less so. So if you're shipping a full truckload of something relatively light, you need a big enough margin to absorb the higher per pound freight rate while a full truckload of something heavier can even be done for things with lower margins.

To maximize load weight and reduce your per pound freight rate for a 53' trailer that is actually filled around 48' you'll want to average about 900lbs per foot or 3600lbs per four feet. So if you have two standard pallets side by side they'll need to average 1800lbs. That average will get you 43,500lbs. If filling a 40' shipping container to the same weight, you'll want around 1080lbs per foot or closer to 2160lbs per standard pallet space.

Point of all of this being that surprisingly inexpensive items like ac adapters, low grade aluminum breakage, cast iron and more can be shipped freight with a fine margin and relatively small investment provided you have the time and space to accumulate. And for heavier inexpensive items like sealed units, copper transformers and heavy aluminum breakage like transmissions and engine blocks, it takes surprisingly little space to arrive at a full truckload weight. 11-14 full gaylords of sealed units is enough for a full truckload, a couple more for electric motors. Or in the case of mixed loads, 4 or 5 4000lb pallets compensates for quite a few 300-600lb pallets to get the average weights you need.

Anyway those are some of the basics for full truckload freight shipping. Hopefully this can help you figure out whether saving up full truckloads of scrap is something you wanna pursue.

JJ,

Great information!

A few things to add. Chances are you won't get a truck with a lift gate, so you need either a forklift or a loading dock. If you don't have a loading dock, you will also need a pallet jack. When I have shipped FTL, the driver's don't want to touch the load, so you really need someone in the trailer, moving the pallets. That does seem kind of odd. You would think they would want to place the load where they want it.

Originally Posted by matador

You'll also need a dock to load the truck. That's the real problem for those of us out here in the middle of nowhere- it just eats into your profits so much to have a truck come to you. That, and I can't imagine having enough stuff to fill an entire truck anyways

You can get a dependable walkie stacker for as little as $600. That and a pallet jack gets your truck loaded albeit slower than with forklift with a dock or ramp. If you part-time it's hard to imagine how you could get a full truck without some really substantial storage space. Scrapping full time it's hard to say. You have to save up quantity while selling enough to support yourself as you tie up funds buying enough to ship. If you've got a good group of suppliers it's for sure possible though or if you do enough great-than-scrap value to grow your buy-sell margin enough that you don't have as much pressure to sell right away it's possible that way too. All that if it's even desirable for you though! People meeting their goals already certainly don't need to add more work just for the sake of more work and a few more pennies.

To load a full truck a dock isnt needed as mentioned earlier. As far as getting a liftgate truck for a full truck is nearly impossible as their are very few out there. If you want to pay a extra few hundred dollars you can get drivers to load the truck. If you have say 12 or so gaylords of material a partial load maybe a option.

Thanks JJ for your post

My first job driving a lift was at a supermarket almost twenty years ago and there we unloaded the trucks with a walker and a pallet jack. Lugging those full pallets of milk with a pallet jack was...unenviable lol. Worst injury ever seen anyone incur with a pallet jack, thankfully, is running over their toes while going backwards and not paying attention or banging their shins. But absolutely anytime you put a couple thousand pounds on wheels danger is just incredibly possible. There are also smaller electric jacks that are sized properly for use inside a trailer that are safer in most aspects but potentially more dangerous too. With care, practice and good habits loading a truck safely even with a pallet jack can be one of the less risky parts of scrap. Then again in an industry that includes a lot of sharp things, heavy things, toxic things and power tools perhaps that isn't saying much lol

Originally Posted by Ewasted

My assumption was most folks who don't have a dock, don't have a forklift or pallet jack would not know what they don't know. Sharp and heavy things are quite ordinary in our space, yes. The perils of loading freight, not so much. Just wanted to shed some light for consideration to safety when folks change their processes.

Great point!

I've trained a whole slew of folks over the years on both fork and electric pallet jack operation inside and outside including in Chicago and Detroit during the winter and am on a lift at least half of every workday. all this starts with safety and have never had an injury thankfully. Guess I was approaching this from the idea that folks wouldn't take on something beyond their capacity. Would be happy to team up on safety tips though there really is no subtitute for actual training.

Those carriers that offer 28' trailers might be a partial solution. They tend to be less expensive and hold a maximum of 26 gaylords (more likely 24) double stacked, or 13 single stacked gaylords/pallets. Inexpensive but heavy items like UPS's can make up a lot of weight, as can towers, switches and servers (presumably if they're not new enough to harvest parts nor old enough to be scrap gold mines).

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Those of us who are on the bigger end of a small time operation deal with this dilemma every day.....we try to accumulate as much as we can until it just overwhelms us then it has to go somewhere.....

Maybe network with the other businesses in your area that have a forklift ?

It's done all the time in this area.