Pipe on the right-of-way has to sit off grade at a consistent height for welding, coating, and inspection. Wood skids became the default way to hold that pipe up because they're cheap per piece and every yard has a pile of them. That pile is a consumable, though, shrinking as skids crack, soak up water, crush under load, and rot in the sun. Every time a stack of skids has to be rebuilt, somebody is pulled off real work while potentially changing the height of the stack the crew originally set.
The fix for this is a reusable stand molded from an engineered plastic, one that shrugs off the water and sun that eat wood, holds its dimensions while under load without, and stays light enough for one person to load back on the truck when the job ends.
How Wood Skids Go Bad
The reality is that skids are already breaking down before they ever reach the right-of-way. They show up cracked, wet, or already rotting, then split under heavy loads. And because they are staged outdoors, the cycle keeps going. Moisture swells and warps the wood before rot sets in, while sun and temperature swings crack the surface.
Loaded skids crush and slump, so a stack set at one height isn't at that height a week later. Prolonged heat hits your skids with all of this at once. Split and crushed pieces come out of service as the job moves, the pile of usable skids shrinks, and crews tend to burn through skids faster than the yard restocks them.
What Re-Cribbing Costs the Spread
Every skid that fails gets replaced by someone hired to do something else. Crews dig through the pile hunting for usable pieces, and that time comes straight out of welding, coating, or inspection. What they find is rarely the same dimension as what they're replacing, so they have to completely rebuild the stack.
A skid already carrying a pipe can't simply be pulled either. The load has to come off it first, which makes the swap a bigger job than setting cribbing before the pipe goes down. Naturally, this is the kind of thing that pops up at the most inconvenient time. Nobody bills for any of this, since it never happens all at once. It leaks out of the schedule a bit at a time until you're hours, even days, behind.
Why Mismatched Cribbing Is a Load Problem
Crews stack cribbing to different heights on purpose. After all, the whole point is to set pipe to one elevation over uneven ground. The trouble starts when a skid crushes or a replacement piece runs a different size, because the top of that stack is no longer where the crew set it. Once one support sits higher than its neighbors, the pipe leans heavily on that one while barely touching the others. A cracked or crushed skid also makes contact over a smaller area, which concentrates force on the pipe and its coating. Meanwhile, the spans between supports stretch as pieces go missing. The longer the gap, the more the pipe sags in the middle. To top it all off, nobody measured the rebuilt stack, so the crew no longer knows the real spacing and support situation.
What a Reusable Stand Changes
A molded stand takes most of those variables off the board. It's the same size every time and it goes back on the truck at the end of the job.
TuffStand comes in a 12" stand at 28.5 lbs rated for 3,500 lbs on 2" to 12" pipe, and a 24" stand at 33.5 lbs rated for 10,500 lbs, molded from Super-Tough Nylon for pipe up to 24".
Under normal conditions stands sit up to 40 linear feet apart. Heavier pipe gets closer spacing so no single stand carries more than it's rated for: 3,500 pounds on the 12" stand, 10,500 on the 24". At a hilltop or an overbend, where the load on one support doubles, use two. Each stand has to sit level, and never on more than a 10-degree slope, so shim it where the ground isn't flat. A stand that's cracked or discolored comes out of service.
Skids get bought for a job, used up over the course of it, and thrown out a few pieces at a time as they fail. The next job starts with a new pile. But with plastic stands, they come off the pipe at the end of a job, go back on the truck, and are ready to be used on the next spread.
