The Advantage

Warehouses don’t retire equipment because it broke; they retire it because it wore out early, and then they buy it again. That’s the problem we built Unitran to solve. Since 1965, we’ve designed, fabricated, and finished warehouse and material handling equipment out of our own facility in Surrey, BC, and every decision we make on the shop floor is built around one question: will this still be doing its job in ten years.

A Finish That Doesn’t Chip Off in Year One

The biggest difference between equipment that lasts and equipment that doesn’t usually isn’t the steel; it’s the finish. We powder coat every product in-house with a UV-resistant polyester powder, and we run our own reclaim and recycle process so overspray gets captured and reused instead of ending up in the waste stream.

Powder coating bonds to the metal instead of sitting on top of it the way wet paint does. That difference matters once a product is in daily use:

• The coating goes on thicker than paint, so it takes more abrasion before it chips or wears through.
• Sharp edges get an “edge build-up” from the coating process, which softens them and protects both the equipment and the person handling it.
• Colour holds under UV exposure instead of fading or chalking the way painted finishes do outdoors or under warehouse lighting.
• Since there’s no wet paint or solvent involved, there’s no peeling at stress points the way there is with baked enamel over time.

That’s why equipment coming off our line holds its colour and resists corrosion in humid, high-traffic warehouse conditions that wear down lesser coatings fast.

Materials and Construction You Can Actually Check

We build primarily in welded tubular steel and heavier gauge steel, and we weld our frames rather than bolt or stamp them together. A welded frame distributes load across the whole structure instead of concentrating stress at fasteners, and there’s nothing to loosen, shear off, or replace down the road. That’s a meaningful difference from stamped construction, where a visible seam and a painted-over joint are usually the first places a unit gives out.

Casters and wheels get the same scrutiny. Every caster or wheel we use is inspected before it goes on a product because a cart is only as reliable as the weakest wheel underneath it. If your operation is rolling loaded carts across concrete all shift, that inspection step is the difference between a wheel that rolls straight for years and one that seizes or flat-spots within a season.

Ready When Your Operation Needs It

Downtime waiting on equipment costs your operation more than the equipment itself. Our most popular hand trucks, carts, and material handling products are kept in stock through authorized distributors and retailers across Western Canada, so you can see and handle a product before it becomes part of your daily operation rather than ordering blind off a spec sheet.

Built to Your Specifications, Not Just Ours

Standard equipment doesn’t always fit a non-standard operation. When a piece of material handling equipment needs to match a specific dock height, load profile, or process, our team designs and manufactures it to that spec rather than asking your operation to adapt to a catalogue item. That includes custom cabinets, containers, stacking racks, safety guards, and other made-to-order products built with the same welded steel construction and in-house finishing as our standard line.

Safety Built In, Not Bolted On

A piece of equipment that fails under load isn’t a minor inconvenience, it’s a safety incident waiting to happen. We design for heavy load-bearing capability and finish every edge smooth through the powder coating process specifically so there’s nothing sharp or unfinished where an operator’s hands will be. Safety isn’t a separate checklist item for us; it’s built into the same design and finishing decisions that make the equipment last.

Designed and Made in Surrey, BC

Manufacturing everything ourselves in Canada gives us control over quality and finish that we wouldn’t have if we were sourcing from overseas suppliers and relabeling the result. We control the steel that comes in, the welds that go together, and the finish that goes on, all under one roof. That control is also why we can build custom orders without routing specs through a third party first.