Above: Engineered with wide-flange structural steel I-beams, Dexco extrusion storage racks provide the weight capacity and adaptability to accommodate long, heavy or delicate materials in industrial settings.
November, 2025- Treating material handling and storage as an afterthought when building a facility for a heavy industrial company comes with negative consequences. That’s according to Steve Luscian, vice president of sales and marketing for Dexco in Leola, Pennsylvania.
“We frequently encounter facilities with 50-ft. ceilings where all products are stored at ground level,” Luscian says. “It’s crucial for heavy industry companies to understand they can utilize their vertical space effectively.”
He adds that they are usually quite efficient in how they move product from the shipping bay to the storage area and to the processing lines, but the storage area itself is not taking advantage of the building’s height.
Not only is it inefficient to store material horizontally, requiring someone to take the time to move items out of the way to access the needed one, it can be downright dangerous, Luscian says. When pallets of coils, for example, are stacked on top of each other to try to maximize existing floor space, accidents have occurred in which coils get tipped over or dropped by a forklift, causing severe injuries and even fatalities, as well as product damage.
An alternative is Dexco I-beam racking systems, which are custom designed to accommodate heavy, irregularly shaped and expensive parts and materials, Luscian says, emphasizing the efficiency and reduced unscheduled downtime such racking enables. “Safety is truly the primary factor driving most of our sales.”
However, achieving those results efficiently cannot occur if a metal service center, fabricator or manufacturer does not plan ahead for the storage infrastructure when designing a facility that it intends to construct, he explains.
Financing, permitting and building a large plant can take five years or more and then retrofitting it to allow an efficient and safe racking system that wasn’t in the original plans can be a significant expense.
Dexco coil racking systems enhance safety standards by storing coils in elevated, secure cradles to prevent movement or roll away incidents.
DOWN THE ROAD
Luscian says one major consideration when designing a facility is the prospect of future growth—long term, not just in a year or two. For example, a processor of aluminum coils, which splits and paints them for customers, eventually realized it didn’t have enough room for both the master and finished coils and had to expand the facility.
“The cost of us going in to provide a vertical storage system for both the master coils and the slit coils is probably a third of the price of what it’s going to cost them for a facility expansion.”
In another instance, a Pennsylvania producer of extrusions initially worked with another material handling system manufacturer that does not supply I-beam racks before determining that a Dexco system would significantly reduce the building’s footprint by being able to store material higher, he notes. The building re-permitting process was time consuming, but the facility ended up costing 25 to 30 percent less. “The earlier that we can get involved, the more impact that we can have on the overall footprint of the building.
In addition, retrofitting a facility can come with a steep price tag if decisions on racking and material handling equipment, such as which type of crane to install, are not made simultaneously, Luscian says. Some facilities use overhead bridge cranes, some use stacker cranes, and each works best with specific types of racking. “Making a change is a very costly investment after the fact.”
Another big retrofitting cost item, he adds, involves the concrete floor if the concrete pad was not designed to handle the eventually weight of the equipment being stored. A company would need to perform concrete core sampling and testing and possibly install a thicker pad. “That gets to become significantly more expensive once you introduce that into the project.”
Dexco reports that it builds its tool, die and widespan racking systems to address the unique challenges of storing manufacturing equipment like tools and dies.
HOW HIGH IS UP?
A typical I-beam racking system, according to Luscian, is 25 to 35 ft. high, but Dexco has installed a 120-ft. high system for storing 65,000-lb. coils. The company reports that its standard systems support loads from 1,000 to 20,000 lbs. per cantilever arm, with heavy-duty options available to handle up to 80,000 lbs. per wide span or coil shelf. Dexco has also produced custom designs for specific load requirements. “Every project that we do is custom engineered,” Luscian says.
Even when the weight of the stored material does not necessarily require a rack made using I-beams, Luscian says some customers select a Dexco rack for safety reasons because an accident damaged a previous rack and they want to avoid that moving forward.
In one instance, a large HVAC equipment builder had a large maintenance budget for its roll form racks and is converting all those racks to an I-beam construction to remove that line item from the budget.
He adds that maintenance on an I-beam rack is minimal, involving only visual inspections to check for damage and periodically checking that the bolts are set to the correct torque, as measured in foot-pounds.
Dexco manufactures a variety of I-beam racks to increase density, including ones for storing coils, tools and dies, bar stock, injection molds, sheet metal, extrusions, tubing, pipes and stanchions, and more. “We’ve done work with several of the large air carriers, storing jet engines on our racks,” Luscian says.
In addition, artificial intelligence is driving the development of new energy sources. “We’re involved in a number of projects for storing big, heavy reels of cable to support the growth of the data centers.”
As Dexco continues to work with industrial customers to help them maximize throughput and minimize costs, Luscian says an ongoing challenge is educating them that the company’s type of vertical storage system is possible. “They just don’t believe we can store an 80,000-lb. coil 40 ft. in the air, but we absolutely can.”
Ross Industrial LLC, dba Dexco, 800/345-8170, dexcoracks.com.
