High-Bay Selective Rack Installation

States Manufacturing designs and builds custom electrical and metal products for a wide range of industries. From control cabinets for traffic management and switchgear for data centers, to panelboards for food processing and fabricated metal components for healthcare and high-end audio equipment.

The company moved into a new 500,000-square-foot facility in Dayton, MN, and they needed a straightforward selective racking system to get product off the floor and take advantage of the building’s exceptionally high ceilings. The goal was simple, but the system was large-scale, storing more than 2,500 pallet positions, designed to make full use of the vertical space the new facility offered.

States Manufacturing was moving into a brand-new building that was still being completed during the relocation. This gave the design team a clean slate to work from, with no existing racking or old layouts to design around. With so few site constraints, the project’s complexity came less from working around limitations and more from getting the fundamentals right: precisely matching shelf dimensions, beam heights, and rack capacity to the product being stored and the current lift equipment.

AK’s design team worked closely with States Manufacturing to map out the available footprint, confirm ceiling heights, and understand the storage application front to back. All of these details gave the team what they needed to determine the right shelf and bay dimensions. A top goal of the project was budget efficiency: instead of defaulting to new racking, the team sourced used pallet racking (Steel King selective) that met the required load capacities while keeping the project well within the client’s budget.

From the start, States Manufacturing expressed an interest in teardrop-style pallet racking, both for its ease of future expansion and the wider availability of replacement and add-on components compared to other rack styles. This forward-looking decision gives the client flexibility to scale the system as their operation grows.

The four-day installation went smoothly, with all on-site staff working quickly with appropriate PPE. The main challenge was coordinating inbound shipments from out of state, which required additional communication with the carrier broker and only caused minor delays. The overall installation timeline was unaffected. The client handled all the permitting, and the project was completed on time with zero safety incidents.