Watch someone grade pallets for the first time and it looks like they are barely looking. A unit comes up the deck, they glance at it, tip it, and it goes into a lane. Two and a half seconds, next one.
What is actually happening is a fixed sequence, in a fixed order, that has been drilled until it stopped requiring conscious thought. It is entirely learnable, and if you generate pallets it is worth learning, because it is the difference between selling a sorted load and selling a mixed one.
One: stringers
The three boards running the length of the pallet carry the load. They are checked first because a failure here ends the inspection — nothing else about the unit matters.
The grader tips the pallet up and looks along the outside face of each stringer, then the inside. What they are looking for is a crack running from a nail hole, which is where stringers almost always fail, and any sign of a previous repair. A companion stringer nailed along the face is obvious once you know to look; a plug is subtler and shows as a slightly different grain around a filled hole.
In our grading, any stringer repair drops the unit out of Grade A. That is stricter than much of the trade and it is deliberate: a racked load is precisely the case where a repaired stringer is tested, and a failure there drops product from height.
Two: deck boards
Count them, then look for breaks. A standard GMA has seven on top and three underneath. Missing boards are obvious. What takes practice is spotting a board that has been replaced with a short one, butted against another to make up the run.
The tell is the joint, usually sitting over a stringer where it is least visible. A butted deck board is a repair we do not accept, because under a concentrated load the joint is a hinge.
Splits matter less than people expect. A hairline split along the grain of a deck board, with no separation, is cosmetic. A split that has opened enough to see daylight through is structural and the board comes off.
Three: footprint
Most 48×40 pallets are 48×40. Some are 47¾×39½ and were built that way by somebody working to a looser tolerance, and those are the units that jam racking six months later.
A grader does not measure every unit. They develop a sense for it, and they check the ones that look slightly wrong against a jig. The same jig catches out-of-square units — diagonals that differ by more than a quarter inch, which is the other thing that jams racking.
This is the check most sellers never think about, and it is one of the more common reasons a load gets rejected at a receiving dock.
Four: moisture, colour and smell
The last check is the fastest and the most sensory. A dry hardwood pallet has a specific weight in the hand. A wet one is noticeably heavier, darker along the end grain, and often smells faintly of mould before any mould is visible.
Anything questionable goes to a pin meter. Above 19% and it does not ship, regardless of how good the wood is, because it will grow mould under stretch wrap within a week and it has lost stiffness.
Smell is the check that matters most for food-sector stock. A unit that spent its life under solvent drums can look perfect and still be unusable, and there is no instrument for it — only a nose and a rule that anything detectable comes out.
Why the order matters
Beginners check in the wrong order — usually deck boards first, because breaks are the most visible thing — and it slows them down by half. If a stringer is cracked, the deck board count is irrelevant, and any time spent on it was wasted.
The sequence is arranged so that the check most likely to end the inspection comes first. It is the same logic as a well-written conditional, and once it becomes automatic, three seconds is comfortable.
It takes most people about eight months to get there. We start everyone on the repair bench rather than the sort deck, because taking pallets apart teaches you what to look for far faster than looking at them does.