If you’ve ever had a customer receive a shipment of goods from you, and immediately point out that the goods were damaged in transport — you already know why some brilliant engineer invented the cargo bar. The most basic cause of damage-in-transport is careless loading of a truck or trailer — loading that causes items to shift during transit due to the lack of proper securing.
Even with wrapped pallets, loads can shift — especially if you have sharp corners or have to very rapidly change lanes. Those small shifts can cause significant alterations to a load’s center of gravity, making each successive turn or sudden jerk of the wheel more dangerous. Eventually, the load can completely destabilize and cause significant damage to a lot of valuable product.
All of this is made possible because loads are generally put in trucks with significant space between the load and the wall of the truck, leaving plenty of room for the load to shift, destabilize, and finally collapse. Enter the cargo bar. Cargo bars are made to brace the load against the wall of the truck, essentially taking up all of that empty space and not allowing the load any room to shift.
Cargo bars are incredibly easy to use — you place them between the sidewalls or from floor to ceiling to keep your loads from shifting from front to back, extend them to fill the gap, and lock them into place. Because they are so quick to set up, they have almost no impact on load and unload times.
Most cargo bars feature steel tubes with 2”x4” or 4”x4” rubber ‘feet’ at either end of the tubes, which are designed to fit together. A ratcheting device forces the feet apart, and once the feet are snug against the load and the truck wall, the ratchet can be locked into place to prevent further motion until the cargo bar is removed.
A cargo bar alone may not be enough to handle every load. When your cargo is particularly fragile or valuable, the best practice is to combine the use of a cargo bar for stabilization from front to back and ratchet straps for stability side to side. When the load is that important, always use multiple fail-safes to ensure a secure arrival.
