Carpet rack is designed to hold rolls of carpeting on racking and shelving. This heavy duty metal shelving or rack shelving accommodates 12′ rolls. A typical roll of carpet is 12’ long and is picked up with a forklift. Instead of using forks on the forklift, the forklift has a carpet pole (also called a ram). See our Material Handling page for carpet pole options for your forklift. The roll of carpet is picked up via forklift by inserting the carpet pole through the diameter hole in the center of the carpet roll. The carpet rack system is made of beams, uprights, row spacers, decking, and anchors. To create a 12’ deep carpet rack, you would use 2 uprights and a row spacer. For example, the front bay can use a 48” upright with a 48” row spacer connected to another 48” upright to create a rack depth of 144” (12’). Each level of the carpet rack will have 4 load beams to rest the roll of carpet on. The carpet rack deck can be made of corrugated metal, wood deck, punch deck, or wire deck. Check with your local fire marshal to see what type of decking meets your local fire code. Corrugated metal decking consists of long sheets of corrugated metal that fit into the front and back step beams, and rest on the 2 center support beams. The corrugated metal decking is TEK screwed into the load beams.
When using tear drop pallet racking that adjusts on 2” centers, we put the front and back beams 2” higher than the center load beams, this way the decking fits into the front and back steps and rests on top of the center load beams. Corrugated metal decking can be solid or perforated. When corrugated metal decking is perforated, slits are punched in the valleys, this allows water through to help meet some local building codes. Solid wood decking is made with 2×4-12” wood supports and sheets of wood. Solid wood decking will not allow a sprinkler systems water through in case of a fire. Punch deck is another form of metal decking that allows sprinkler water through in the event of a fire. We have used wire decking to cover carpet rack. In this case, we build 3 bays deep to support 3 wire decks deep. When building carpet rack, it is the customer’s choice whether they wish to place carpet on the floor with beam levels above or have a beam level just above the floor. Having a floor beam level can protect your carpet from moisture. Most customers like to have the uprights taller than the top beam level to help contain and divide the carpet rolls. Carpet rack requires wide aisles to accommodate the forklift and carpet pole. Aisles can range from 22-26’ wide depending on the type of forklift used.