M & H PALLET GROWS INTO FULL-TIME OPERATION

Jim Masters, co-owner of M & H Pallet Co. of Cape Girardeau, is surrounded by finished pallets his company builds from old pallets.

Mike Hellman, co-owner of M & H Pallet Co., operated a pallet disassembler. Boards in good condition are reused to build a new pallet.

Mike Hellman and Jim Masters have been building pallets in their spare time during the past three years.

The M & H Pallet Co., 1566 County Road 649, Cape Girardeau, is no longer a "spare-time" company.

Hellman of Cape Girardeau, and Masters of Grand Tower, Ill., have left behind their previous occupations and are devoting full time to the manufacturing of pallets.

"It was a good part-time business," said Hellman, previously service manager for Data Business Systems in Cape Girardeau a number of years.

Masters previously worked in manufacturing at Unimin Specialty Minerals Inc., a manufacturer of silica in Alexander County in Illinois, where he operated a "palletizer," a machine that places products on pallets.

M & H Pallet started out manufacturing new pallets, but now specializes in recycled pallets.

"The recycled products are just as durable and can result in big savings to the users," Hellman said.

The company became interested in its recycled products early on.

During the wet-weather year of 1992, the fledgling company ran into complications finding lumber.

"Loggers had problems getting logs, and sawmills had trouble providing us with new lumber," Hellman said.

During that same year, Hellman and Masters visited the Midwest Forest Industry Show, which is conducted every two years at the Show Me Center on the Southeast Missouri State University campus.

"Some companies displayed some lumber recycling equipment that year," Hellman said. "Another company demonstrated the latest technology and computerized equipment in the manufacture of pallets."

After investigating the use of recycled products and investing in new equipment, M & H Pallet started building recycled pallets.

"Initially, it was a mix of new and old lumber," Masters said. "But, we have found that customers are interested in total recycled pallets. Now, we're 95 percent recycled material."

Recycled pallets can save as much as 50 percent and are as strong and "equally reliable," Hellman said. "They just may not be quite as pretty."

In preparing for the full-time operation, M & H recently added more new equipment, including an automatic cutoff show.

"We have an automated pallet-building machine, and have upgraded our dismantling machine," Masters said.

M & H offers free pickup and removal service for old pallets.

"We take any size, any shape, any condition pallets," Hellman said.

Once the old pallets are brought into the M & H facility, they are disassembled and sorted by size and shape.

"There are hundreds of sizes and shapes of pallet boards. There are hundreds of sizes of pallets," Hellman said.

Every board is re-sized and cut to specifications needed.

"We rebuild to order," Hellman said. "We excel with specialty pallets in any shape and size."

Pallets, Masters explained, are designed to match its load.

"If a company has a group of certain-sized boxes, we'll build pallets designed for those boxes," he said.

The company provides pallets to companies throughout Southern Illinois and Southeast Missouri.

The manufacture of pallets in Missouri and the United States has grown since World War II.

One longtime manufacturer of wooden pallets explained that before WWII, there was no big demand for pallets. The mechanization that grew out of the war resulted in high pallet demand, and pallet companies grew rapidly through the 1940s and 1950s.

"Pallets are still big items," Masters said. "Almost everyone uses them."

Pallets are of two basic designs, two-way and four-way, explained Masters.

The the two-way pallets permit entry of forks or hand pallet trucks from two sides only, in opposite directions. The four-way pallets permit entry on all four sides.

There are also two styles of pallets, a single-face pallet with one deck as the top surface. The other is a double-face pallet with both top and bottom decks.

Sizes vary, with as many as 50 different sizes.

"Whatever the customer wants, we'll make," Hellman said.

Many pallet companies, in their heyday, built pallets and boxes, and in most cases, had their own logging and sawmill operations. Many pallet companies today find it is less expensive to purchase "non-grade" hardwood from furniture mills and sawmills.

The furniture mills sell what they can't use for "grade lumber."

What the pallet people are looking for is strength, not beauty.