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A pallet manufacturer does not choose a fastener. They choose a production rate and a reject rate. At the scale of thousands of units a shift, a small difference in the fastener turns into hours of downtime, repeated jams, and pallets rejected on the line. The question is never "which fastener is cheapest." It is "which fastener costs me the least per pallet shipped."
That distinction is the same one we made in our piece on industrial ROI and the true cost of generic fasteners: the lowest sticker price routinely hides the highest total cost. Nowhere is that truer than in high-volume pallet production, where every jam and every failed joint multiplies across the run.
Holding power comes first
A pallet spends its life being loaded, stacked, handled, and shaken. A smooth-shank fastener holds poorly under that regime: repeated stress works it loose, and a loose joint becomes a rejected or returned pallet. This is where shank choice stops being a detail and becomes the whole economics of the joint.
Ring-shank nails change the math. Their rings bite into the wood fibres and resist withdrawal, which translates directly into fewer pallets loosening in service and fewer returns. For structural pallet joints, the same principle drives the choice of staple: a wide crown spreads holding force across a larger contact area, locking boards together in a way a narrow fastener cannot.
Shur-Fast 16GA wide crown staples are built for exactly this work. With a full 1" crown, a galvanized finish and our Sharper Point (SP) profile, they seat securely and stay seated through rough handling. Crating and pallets are their primary application, and they run in the Bostitch, Senco and Everwin wide crown tools already common on pallet lines.
Coil, not strip, for continuous runs
At high cadence, feeding is the real bottleneck. A coil tool carries far more fasteners than a strip tool, which cuts how often the line stops to reload and keeps production moving. Across a continuous run, those seconds saved at every reload add up to real throughput over a full shift.
Shur-Fast wire weld and plastic coil nails are manufactured at our Montreal facility for that continuous-feed environment, available in the shank types that matter for pallet hold: smooth, ring, and screw, in bright, hot-dipped galvanized, aluminum or stainless finishes. For a pallet line, ring shank in a coil format is often the sweet spot, marrying withdrawal resistance to uninterrupted feeding.
Compatibility keeps the line running
A fastener that fights the tool is a fastener that jams, and a jammed tool is a stopped line. Shur-Fast coil nails are engineered for the pneumatic tools already on most production floors, with documented compatibility across brands including Bostitch, Senco, Max, Hitachi, and Everwin. Matching the fastener to the tool already in service is the difference between a smooth shift and one spent clearing misfeeds.
This is also where fastener choice and tool maintenance start to overlap, a connection worth understanding before it costs you an expensive tool. We will take that up in next month's piece on pneumatic tool care.
The bottom line for a pallet line
Specify for withdrawal resistance first: ring shank and wide crown, because a loose pallet is a rejected pallet. Choose coil over strip to keep the line fed and moving. And confirm the fastener matches the tool already on the floor, so throughput is not eaten by jams. Costed per pallet shipped rather than per box purchased, the right fastener is almost never the cheapest one on the shelf. It is the one that ships the most good pallets per shift.
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Shur-Fast manufactures pneumatic coil nails at its Montreal facility, in bright, hot-dipped galvanized, aluminum and stainless finishes, and imports 16GA wide crown galvanized staples engineered for crating and pallet production. Explore our staples and nails, or download the catalogue for complete specifications.