The 3 ways or methods for storing tires

There are 3 different ways to store tires: stacked on the sidewall, on the tread or laced. The 3 methods depicted below illustrate the situations why each would be used and reasons they are chosen. We believe that lacing and on tread are the best however. As they allow for great savings, storage space, handling time and service levels. Also,using the appropriate racks adds employee safety in the equation.

The most common way is to stack the tires on the sidewall. When on the gound, people stack them 8-10 high, making the tires very unstable and the tire on the bottom of the stack can be damage on the long run. When using a tire rack, you stack them 6-7 high and then add another rack on top, thus using vertical space. Some Health & Safety Organization ask to wrap the stack of tires so they don’t fall from the rack. This adds labour and material cost. If you are stacking tires and it suits your needs, then using tire racks to free up your floor and using the vertical space might be the best option for you. It is a low cost solution, and you might want to consider a steel pallet like the MSR-6060 instead of a wooden one as it will be sturdier and will not require repair and made to stack. Remember that all tires should be the same SKU in each rack, to ease order picking or finding a tire.

Lacing your tires is the best way to save space. By using the tire’s center (which is a waste of space) to place other tires while lacing, you might save up to 25-30% storage space. Though it might be more difficult for your inventory count, since you won’t know by a quick look at a rack how many tires there, and the bottom tires might get damaged on the long run, when staying static for 8-12 months in a rack. However, even if you have 10 out of 8000 tires damaged each year; the cost of the damage is negligible compared to the 25% in savings this storing technique represents. This tire storage technique is normally done with large quantities of the same SKU. If you are in this situation, you might want to consider a lacing rack like the

MLR. Handling a large amount of the same SKU will get the maximum benefit for the cost of this solution.

Finally, the best way to store your tires is on the tread, because it’s the natural way for a tire to sit. Storing them in this manner, you will never have quality problems or damaged tires. Also, you can have different SKUs in the same rack, since they are all free standing, and have easy access to each one of them. You will store the same amount of tires than if the were stacked on the sidewall and but less than if they were laced. This is why we came up with a type of tire rack (Light truck & passenger folding rack MLTFD) that will enable you to store tires either on tread or laced. Though this solution requires more investment initially, there are gains to be made that will compensate the extra cost. Typically, working with the MLFTD rack with 20 000* tire will require one less employee to handle the tires than if working with a MLR. This represents reduced operation costs of 30 000$ per year (based on a 40h/week at 15$/h wage),  meaning you recuperate your costs by the example of a warehouse using 2 methods to store tiresend of year one and benefit thereafter. You will also have more flexibility regarding your storing options. Most clients use this rack with both methods.
*see example below in the Tire System Comparison


Martins Industries, manufacturer of racking, has been designing and producing tire storage racks for tires for most of the major tire manufacturers since 1987. Over the years, we have designed numerous types of racking to better suit our customer's needs.