CHICAGO 43rd Street Chicago
Thomas Murrihy Sr. and his brother, John, entered the pallet business in 1972. Tom was the manager of a trucking company terminal, and John ran a meat and trucking business. John accumulated pallets, so the brothers formed Murrihy Pallet to begin recycling them. “The family started in the pallet business almost as an accident when we were connected with the local meat business,” Tom recalled.
John continues to run Murrihy Pallet, but Tom launched Cardinal Pallet in 1987 to focus on supplying new pallets. “The name came to my wife and me when we were sitting in our backyard, watching a red bird on the fence. It was a Cardinal, and we thought it was a good name to use.” The brothers continue to do business together if they have the opportunity.
Today Tom runs Cardinal Pallet with the help of two sons, Tom Jr. and Brian. Tom holds the title of CEO while Tom Jr. is president and Brian is
Other key people on the Cardinal Pallet management team are plant foreman Manuel Batres and office manager
Cardinal Pallet, which advertises itself as ‘Chicagoland’s Complete Pallet Supplier,’ is in one of the nation’s largest pallet markets – if not the biggest. The company, a member of the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association (NWPCA), supplies new and reconditioned pallets in standard and custom sizes. The business is conveniently located within about 15 minutes of the major highways. Local rumor has it that the building housing the company’s office was once used by Al Capone to make bootleg liquor during Prohibition.
Cardinal Pallet focuses on the niche market for specialty and custom pallets. Its customers are manufacturers or distributors of paper products, automotive parts, groceries and other products. The company deliberately changed its focus years ago to customers that need 100 to 200 of seven or eight sizes or footprints, said Tom Jr. Cardinal Pallet also manufactures GMA pallets but prefers to sell them in truckload quantities.
When Pallet Enterprise visited the company’s plant, finished pallets were being loaded into two 53-foot trailers to be delivered to a business that manufactures pool tables and a food processing company.
Types of pallets made at Cardinal include:
n heavy duty, two-way entry stringer
n heavy duty, four-way entry stringer
n skids
n plywood panel deck
n four-way entry block
n reversible, two-way entry stringer
n single-wing
The company makes many more beside the above list and also brokers
Just-in-Time Delivery
Cardinal specializes in custom pallets and also ‘just-in-time’ delivery service. It delivers 20-25,000 pallets weekly with its fleet of 40 trailers. The 53-foot trailers are painted white with the red Cardinal logo adorning the side. The company also has four tractors for moving the trailers.
“A lot of purchasing agents demand just-in-time delivery,” noted Tom Jr. “If you can’t provide that kind of service, you won’t get the orders. We have the resources to supply new pallets ‘just-in-time.’ ”
Another service that Cardinal provides to customers is delivering trailer-load quantities of pallets and leaving the trailer on the customer’s premises to store the pallets. Cardinal Pallet retrieves the trailer later when it is empty.
Being able to provide ‘just-in-time’ delivery to customers requires Cardinal Pallet to keep a large inventory of pallet cut stock and finished pallets in the yard. During a tour of the yard, Tom Jr. said, “We only have inventory of 40,000 pallets at the moment, which is pretty small for us.” The inventory typically is made up of 70% new and 30% reconditioned pallets.
“Business is on the upswing for us right now,” said Brian. Sales are up 18% to 20% compared to last year, he said.
Cardinal Pallet ships to customers within a 75-mile radius. It supplies both hardwood and softwood pallets. All softwood pallets are made with heat-treated lumber to comply with export phytosanitary requirements.
“We buy pallet stock from six different states and from
Plant, Equipment
Cardinal uses a variety of different machines to disassemble and rebuild used pallets and to manufacture new pallets. The company’s operations are housed in three buildings. Pallet dismantling and lumber recycling operations are performed in one building, cut-up operations are in a second, and pallets are assembled in the third building.
Cardinal has about 30 employees, and they normally work
About 20 of the company’s workers have been employed by Cardinal Pallet for more than three years. Employees are cross-trained so they can be shifted to another task as the business requires. The company pays its workers well and provides benefits such as health insurance, paid holidays and profit sharing.
In the recycling shop, a Heartland BSD-52 bandsaw dismantler is used to disassemble pallets. The machine, made by Heartland Fabrication and Machine, has an air ride table for increased production and is used to dismantle block and stringer pallets and over-size pallets.
Cut-Up Operations
Across the street, another building houses the cut-up operations. The work horse in the plant is a Brewer Inc.-Golden Eagle horizontal band resaw, a Silver Eagle model. It is used regularly to resaw 2×4 and 4×4 stock.
When Pallet Enterprise visited, the Brewer Silver Eagle was being used to take a thin shim off some rough deck boards. “This is for a customer who wants perfectly flat pallet decks with a constant ¾-inch board thickness,” said Tom Jr.
“The guys like working with the Brewer Silver Eagle,” Tom Jr. added. “It makes a nice consistent product and is simple to maintain. It is heavy built, and we haven’t really needed any factory service since we bought it. The machine is also used to rip wider lumber that is fed through standing on edge against the fence.”
The Brewer Inc.-Golden Eagle band resaw can run either 1-inch or 1-1/4-inch wide blades that are 13-foot, 5 inches long. “We use 1-inch wide Morse blades with 0.035-inch kerf,” said Manuel. “They are supplied by a local parts supplier, and they usually last eight hours on average, unless we hit a nail. We don’t re-sharpen them. We throw them away after use.” The blades are held in place by carbide guide pads.
The plant is also equipped with a Baker Products BBR-0 horizontal band resaw that is used when needed to provide additional resawing capacity.
A Newman Whitney KM-16 multi-trim saw is used to cut long material to length for deck boards and stringers. Lumber is loaded manually onto a series of parallel lug chains that carry the boards transversely through four adjustable circular cut-off saws. The operator can also use the machine to trim a split end off at the same time, according to how a board is loaded onto the chains. Two men at an outfeed turntable offload the short boards and stack them.
The company is also equipped with Morgan and Hazlethorn notching machines for notching stringers.
The company has six forklifts for moving pallets and material, three Yale trucks and three
Scrap wood is placed in dumpsters to be hauled away or given away for firewood.
New Pallet Assembly
New pallets are assembled in the third building on a Viking Turbo 505 nailing machine. The Viking Turbo 505 is constructed from several different modules that go together to make up the system. The overall machine, which is about 10 years old, is 58 feet long.
“We keep it up pretty good,” said Tom Jr., “and it hasn’t needed anything major in terms of parts — just the usual things that wear out.” Replacement parts are supplied from the Viking factory in
The Viking Turbo 505 is controlled by a programmable logic controller running Viking’s own TurboPro software. It controls the automatic sequencing of the entire machine line and also allows the operator to store hundreds of different pallet footprints in the memory system. The operator merely selects the quantity required and the customer’s stored pallet size; the system automatically recalls the nailing locations.
The Viking Turbo 505 can assemble pallets from 28 to 72 inches long, 28 to 60 inches wide, and 3-1/2 to 7 inches high. It can accommodate deck boards ranging from 3/8-inch to 1-1/2 inches thick and 2-1/2 to 8 inches wide. Like other Viking nailing machines, it uses bulk nails.
The Viking Turbo 505 can assemble up to 200 pallets an hour, according to Tom Jr. “It’s a good machine,” he said, “and it is the main reason we have been able to grow as a company. Typically, with our ‘just-in-time’ service, we get a phone call on Monday night, and at
“We have had a very long relationship with most of our customers,” noted Tom “They trust us to keep stock on hand for them when they need it.”
Cardinal uses Stanley-Bostitch power nailing tools and fasteners for hand assembly of some new pallets and pallet repairs, and it uses Mid-Continent bulk nails for its Viking nailing machine.
Workers compensation insurance is a major cost issue to their business, and premiums continue to increase annually.
Operating in freezing temperatures of
“It would help our industry tremendously if a solution can be found to eliminate this problem,” Tom added. “The machine manufacturers and cut stock mills need to address this issue.”
Cardinal Pallet has built a strong foundation in the
