I'm loathe to call it racking, but we've self-built and installed by our carpenters, some shelving/stores racking in our stores warehouse.

Other than the chippy scratching his head and saying, "Oooh, I reckon it'll take a ton or so"  I guess the only way I'll get to know a load limit is by using test loads up to the failure point, then coming back down to a weight with a safety factor included,

Unless anyone else has any experience or suggestions please ??

In my experience, racking is for storing heavy items such as pallets, and is accessed by FLT, whereas shelving is for lighter items and is accessed by hand. So what you have is shelving, and presumably somebody requested this to be built, with an expectation of load? If you think you will be exceeding the load weight of your newly installed shelving, would you not rather have racking with a designated load limit?

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Hi Pete, hmmmmmm........

200 years ago, your carpenters would have the experience to build something bespoke and you would decide that may be you had overloaded the shelves when they started to deflect, and you would either reduce the load and/strengthen the structure.

These days you would usually get somebody into put in some proprietary system racking adjusted to fit the space and you would have plenty of documentation to justify the safe working load.....BUT....you are past that point!

So....do you have a student engineer who could do drawings showing the set up and then do some calculations, based on the dimensions of the timbers taking into account its fixtures, bracing, method of securing to the building etc etc etc? May be they could get that validated by a competent engineer to come to a decision as to a defendable safe working load?

Looking at this from a pragmatic rather than legalistic viewpoint, you need to think about who or what is at risk should this all come tumbling down.

Which might drive you in the direction of taking it apart and starting again (though to be honest it would be good if the fruits of your chippy's hard work could be left standing - perhaps for the storage of things that don't weight very much - NOT a tonne!!).

Also had this question a few years ago and found this on the internet. It was a little different when I found it but this is their latest take on the subject and should be helpful, once you have scrolled down a lot.

https://www.sema.org.uk/technical-faqs/

Chris