When shipping warehouse cages, designing the external cage dimensions backward from the truck compartment's internal dimensions lets you fit several more cages per truck and cuts logistics cost directly. Many cage factories build only standard sizes without asking what truck the customer runs, leaving the ends and sides of the compartment empty—freight money wasted.
First get familiar with typical truck internal dimensions: a 4.2m light-plate truck is about 1.8 to 2.0m wide inside and 4.2m long; a 6.8m stake-bed truck is 2.3m wide and 6.8m long; a 9.6m rigid truck is 2.4m wide and 9.6m long. Arrange the cage external dimensions around these modules to maximize space use.
Example: a 9.6m compartment is 2.4m wide inside; two 1200mm-wide cages side by side fill exactly 2.4m with no gap. Along the length, six 1000mm-deep cages fill 6m, and the remaining 3.6m takes three more rows, for 2×9=18 cages per truck. If the cage were made 1250mm wide, two side-by-side would exceed the width, forcing end-to-end rows and dropping the load factor by 30%.
The vertical direction must be calculated too. Stake-bed trucks usually have 400 to 600mm-high sideboards, and the total height of cage plus cargo must stay within the sideboard plus lashing range. For high-stake or box trucks, check the internal height; when cages are transported stacked, calculate the total height so it stays within legal limits.
Practical tip: tell the cage maker the internal length, width and height of your common truck models and have them produce a layout drawing to verify; when buying new cages, prefer combinations of two standard modules that suit both pallets and truck compartments. Nanjing Tongnuo supports custom external dimensions based on the customer's fleet dimensions to raise the full-truck load factor.