Maximize Storage: The Real-World Pros and Cons of Single-Sided vs. Double-Sided Cantilever Racks
Herochu CE/ISO-certified systems, tailor-made for your bay, from $4,899
Google sends fabricators here when they type:
“cantilever rack for 6 m aluminum bars,”
“single-sided vs double-sided cantilever,”
“wall-mounted cantilever rack CE certified,”
“how to store steel tubing without floor contact,”
“high-density cantilever rack for narrow aisle.”
If one of those phrases brought you, stay sixty seconds and you will leave with hard numbers, installation footprints, and a five-year cost model you can paste straight into your CapEx request.
Cantilever racks were invented for the awkward stuff—tube, bar, extrusion, sheet bundles, pre-cut stair stringers—anything that laughs at pallet racking. Forks hit uprights, loads teeter, paint scrapes off before the job starts. Cantilever arms project clear of any front column, so a forklift lowers the load once, squarely, and leaves. The result is faster handling, less product damage, and aisles narrow enough to keep your lease costs sane.
Picture a 12 m × 24 m bay with a 4 m ceiling and one wall already lined with offices. Floor space is premium, but that wall is begging to be used. Herochu single-sided racks mount 200 mm off the wall on galvanized kick plates; arms project 600 mm, 800 mm, or 1 m depending on the bundle depth. A standard 3 m-high starter bay with five arms per column costs $4,899 and stores 15 t of carbon-steel box section—roughly 240 pieces of 100 × 50 × 6 m—while eating only 1.2 m² of floor. Because the load is transferred into the wall, the frame weight is 20 % lighter than a freestanding unit, freight to Rotterdam or Houston is cheaper, and one installer plus a scissor lift can have it bolted up before lunch.
The drawback is you can only pick from the front. If tomorrow you buy a second forklift and decide to run a through-flow strategy, the wall side becomes a dead end. The rack is also rated for 750 kg per arm, not the 1.5 t you get on double-sided, because overturning moment is restrained by concrete block rather than a larger base. Fire code in some EU counties counts a wall-mounted system as “stored against a wall,” which can trigger an additional 0.5 m setback from sprinklers—check with your local AHJ.
Now knock out the offices and gain the full 24 m length. A double-sided starter bay stands 3 m high, 1.2 m deep, and offers ten arms per meter—five each face. One 4.8 m long bay stores 30 t, double the single-sided density, yet the footprint grows only to 2.4 m². You gain bidirectional picking, so one operator can unload incoming tube from the rear while another feeds a bandsaw from the front—no congestion, no hand-off delay. Arms are rated 1.5 t apiece, so you can park a full 6 m bundle of 200 × 200 × 8 mm SHS on a single level without blinking.
The trade-off is upfront cash: the same 3 m bay costs $7,399 because you are buying two sets of arms and a larger base frame. Freight climbs accordingly—one double-sided unit ships in four crates versus two for single-sided. You also need 3.5 m clear aisle on each face to stay within EU EN 15620 forklift guidelines; squeeze narrower and you lose the productivity you just paid for. In tight retrofit buildings that can mean rearranging columns or even cutting doorway openings, which quickly dwarfs the rack invoice.
Normalize everything to one square metre of floor. Single-sided, 3 m height, 0.6 m arm: 12.5 t/m². Double-sided, 3 m height, 0.8 m arm: 20.8 t/m². Traditional floor stacking with 0.5 m walkways: 2.1 t/m². If your lease is €65/m²/year, the double-sided rack pays the occupancy cost of the footprint in 2.3 months; floor stacking takes 22 months. That is why CFOs who never cared about rack design suddenly volunteer to carry the first box of bolts during install.
Both models use Herochu’s wedge-lock pin: tap it in with a mallet and the arm moves on 100 mm pitch. No tools, no thread stripping, no lost nuts inside the coffee jar. Need to store 75 × 75 angle tomorrow after running 150 × 100 flat bar today? Drop the top arms two levels and you are live in five minutes.
Double-sided racks behave like portal frames; single-sided rely on wall anchorage. Herochu supplies finite-element certificates for both configurations per EN 1993 and can stamp regional seismic spectra for Italy’s zone 2 or coastal wind loads in Northern Germany. If you are in a high-risk zone, the double-sided base grows to 1.5 m depth and the price adds roughly 8 %—cheap insurance compared to an inspector’s red tag.
Cantilever racks are modular like Lego. Begin with one single-sided bay against the wall; when order volume doubles, bolt a double-sided starter to it and run add-on bays down the aisle. You reuse every arm and brace you already own—no “orphan” parts, no write-off. One Herochu client in Gdansk began with $4,899 in 2019; today they have 88 m of double-sided rack and still use the original arms on bay one.
Accessorize when niche pain points appear. Decking panels drop into arms to create a solid shelf for loose plates. Rubber arm caps stop aluminum extrusion from galling. Dividers every 200 mm keep bundles of bar from telescoping. LED strips magnetic-mount under the front lip for 24 h operations. Barcode strip slides into the arm profile so you can label each level with location codes for your WMS.
Run the five-year total cost model. Assumptions: 50 t monthly throughput, 3 % scrap reduction due to better handling, €65/m² lease, 7 % energy inflation. Single-sided, 15 t capacity: $4,899 + install $600 → five-year cost $5,499. Double-sided, 30 t capacity: $7,399 + install $800 → five-year cost $8,199. Scrap savings: 50 t × 12 mo × 5 yr × 3 % × €650/t = €58,500. Space savings versus floor stack: 181 m² × €65 × 5 yr = €58,825. Even if you ignore labor productivity, the double-sided rack returns 7.1× its purchase price within five years; the single-sided returns 10.8× because the entry ticket is lower.
Herochu racks land in knock-down form—columns, arms, braces, and base bolts—on one shrink-wrapped pallet. Two fitters, one impact wrench, and a torque multiplier can build a 4.8 m double-sided bay in 90 minutes. Level the base with the supplied shim pack, torque the M16 bolts to 220 Nm, and take a photo for the CE conformity file we generate for you. No on-site welding, no hot-work permit, no fire watch. If you relocate, unbolt, stack, and move; resale value on the secondary market runs 65 % of invoice because the galvanizing outlives the lease.
Ask any operator who has spent a rainy Monday digging 8 m bars out of a floor heap how he feels about driving into a lit aisle, pulling one bundle, and being back at the saw in under two minutes. Productivity metrics spike, but so does mood. A happier shop floor has lower turnover, and lower turnover cuts your training budget faster than any kaizen event can.
Download the Excel ROI calculator from the link above, plug in your real estate cost, hourly machine rate, and scrap allowance. If the payback is inside twelve months—and it almost always is—hit “Request Quote,” tell us the tallest load and the heaviest bundle, and we will configure either a single-sided wall-hugger or a double-sided island that turns your long-length storage from cost centre into profit engine.
