Cantilever
Store what a palletwas never going to hold
Pipe, tube, bar, lumber, board, roll goods — material that arrives in lengths and will not sit on a pallet. Cantilever carries it on arms fixed to columns, with nothing across the front to work around. OTS designs it, supplies it, installs it and certifies it.
Where it sits
It is not a palettier, and that is not a detail
Québec's rack guides put the static and dynamic pallet-rack families on one side and the râtelier en porte-à-faux on the other. Most of what a buyer has read about bays, plaques and rack inspection was written for the other side.
- Arms, not beams
- A pallet rack carries a load between two frames. A cantilever rack carries it out from a single column on an arm, which leaves the front face open: nothing to steer around, nothing to lift over, and a load that can run past the end of the position it started in.
- A separate family in the guides
- CSA A344 is the user guide for steel pallet racking, and a cantilever rack is not one. The Québec prevention guide classes it apart from both the static and the dynamic families. A rack-standard citation does not cover it, and should not be offered as though it did.
- Capacity belongs to the arm
- There is no single bay figure the way there is on a pallet rack. What the structure will take depends on the arm, on the column behind it, and on where along the arm the load actually sits. One number does not describe it.
- A steel structure, sealed as one
- In Québec the design of a structure is a reserved engineering act, so the drawings are prepared and sealed by an engineer — here, an OIQ member at Optim-Structure, our sister engineering firm. The calculation accounts for the handling equipment working around it, lateral impact from that equipment, and the seismic conditions of the site.
- Density is the trade
- Cantilever is not a dense way to store anything. An arm holds one layer, the front stays open, and the floor plan pays for both. That is the deal: you are buying reach and access to material no pallet position can hold.
What goes on the arms
Whatever arrives in lengths
The prevention guide's own examples are pipe, metal rod and roll goods. In practice a run holds whatever the building receives in lengths.
- Pipe and tube
- Bar, rod and metal profile
- Lumber, timber and mouldings
- Sheet, board and panel stock
- Roll goods — carpet, membrane, textile
- Aluminium and vinyl extrusion
- Bundled and banded material that arrives in lengths
- Anything a lift truck has to carry sideways
Round stock is why arms should carry end stops. A pipe that rolls off an arm falls the height of the run into an aisle that is open by design — the open front is the whole advantage of this family, and the end stop is what keeps it from being the hazard as well.
Before the drawing
Four answers, then the steel
None of these is a preference. Each one changes the structure, and getting them in the wrong order is how a run ends up sized for the catalogue instead of for the material.
- The material, honestly
- Not the average length — the longest one, the heaviest one, and the one that sags. A run sized on the average fails on the outlier, and the outlier is the piece somebody stores there anyway.
- How it is handled
- Fork, clamp, side-loader, crane, or two people and a shoulder. The equipment sets the aisle, sets the reach, and decides how much of the load lands on one arm at a time.
- The building
- The slab, the clear height, the columns already standing where you wanted a run, and whether it stands inside or out. Outdoors, weather becomes a load and the finish stops being cosmetic.
- One side or two
- A double-sided run shares one column line between two faces; a single-sided run stands against a wall and takes its load to one side. It is a layout decision before it is a product decision, and it is easier to make on paper than after the anchors are in.
FAQ
Questions we get
Not under the same document. The annual specialist inspection defined by CSA A344 is written for pallet racking, so a cantilever run is examined against its own sealed design instead — columns, arms, base connections, anchors, end stops, and the same floor-level impact zone a lift truck creates on anything it works beside. The distinction matters on paper: a report should say what it measured the structure against, and the two are not interchangeable.
No. They are different structures, calculated differently and connected differently, and a component from one is not a spare part for the other. Cutting, splicing or welding a rack component can affect its capacity and its safety, and any reconfiguration requires the structure to be re-certified by an engineer. If you need cantilever, what you need is a cantilever run.
Treat it as settled wherever a lift truck works. A cantilever column carries its load out to one side, so the base connection and the anchors are not an accessory — they are part of how the structure stands up at all. That is decided in the design, not improvised on the day of the install.
It happens constantly with lumber and pipe, and it changes two things. Weather becomes a load, so the structure is calculated for an exposed site rather than a sheltered one. And in corrosive air the protective finish stops being cosmetic — the racking standard calls for galvanizing where a structure sits in a corrosive environment, and the same reasoning applies here. Neither is decided by a catalogue page.
Related
Talk it through
Bring us your longest load
Book a call with an advisor. The material, the handling and the building are the three answers a cantilever run gets designed from.