Nine jobs out of ten want a plain box with doors on one end. This one's about the tenth — and about knowing which one you are before you spend the extra.
Ask most container yards what they've got and you'll be offered a 20ft or a 40ft, used or new, and that's the conversation. Fair enough — general purpose units cover the overwhelming majority of jobs, and we sell more of them than everything else combined.
But every week we take a call from someone whose problem isn't storage. It's loading. They've got a forklift that can't reach past the first two pallets, or a load that has to come in over the top, or stock that has to stay cold. That's what the specialty range exists for, and it's worth knowing it exists before you buy the wrong box and work around it for ten years.
The whole long side swings open on doors, instead of just one end. It turns a 20ft container from a tunnel into a shelf — you can put a forklift tine on any pallet in the unit without shuffling the eleven in front of it.
Who actually needs one: anyone racking or palletising inside. Parts departments, workshops with a tool wall, hire fleets, market and event operators loading out at speed, and dangerous goods stores where you need to reach any drum without climbing over the rest. It's the single most useful specialty unit we sell, and the one people are most annoyed they didn't know about.
The trade-off is honest: side-openers cost meaningfully more than a general purpose unit of the same size, there are more door seals to maintain, and you need clear working room along the full side, not just at the end. If the container is going against a fence, a side-opener is money burnt.
Cargo doors at both ends. Drive-through access, or two separate crews working from opposite ends without walking the length of the box. Popular on building sites where the container sits between two work areas, and with anyone who's ever had to unload the back of a 40-footer to reach one thing.
Worth knowing: a second door set is a second thing to seal and a second thing to secure. It's a genuinely good option for the right layout and pointless for the wrong one.
No hard roof — a tarpaulin over roof bows instead, with a removable end header so a crane or excavator can load from above. Built for cargo that can't come in through a door: machinery, drill pipe, tall plant, bulk material.
Be clear-eyed about this one. An open-top with a tarpaulin roof is not a sealed steel box, and we don't sell it as one — if what you're storing has to stay dry through a Queensland summer, buy a hard-top general purpose unit and load it through the doors. Open-tops are a loading solution, not a storage grade.
Collapsible or fixed end walls, no sides, no roof. These are transport equipment more than storage equipment: oversize plant, boats, transformers, anything wider or taller than a standard box. Most people who ring about a flat rack actually want an open-top, and about a third of them actually want a float. Worth a two-minute phone call before you commit to any of the three.
A reefer is an insulated container with a refrigeration unit on one end, running off three-phase power or a genset. If you need cold, that's the unit, and the questions that matter are power supply, temperature range and servicing — not size.
The useful bit: a retired reefer with the machinery removed becomes a heavily insulated dry container, and that's a genuinely good buy for anything that hates Queensland heat. Chemicals with a storage temperature ceiling, electronics, resins, paint, cellared stock. Insulated walls do more for the inside temperature of a container than anything you can bolt to the outside of one.
Our own specialty, and the one specialty type we deliberately keep in stock rather than source to order. Bunded floor, ventilation, ready for class placarding. We've written the plain-English version separately — see what you actually need in a DG container, or the DG range.
Most callers who ask about a specialty unit should buy a standard one. Specialty containers cost more up front, take longer to source, and the pool of buyers is smaller when you come to sell — a plain 20ft resells to anyone in the country, a flat rack resells to a much shorter list.
So the test is simple. If the specialty feature solves a problem you'll hit every time you use the container — every load, every day — it pays for itself quickly, and a side-opener in a busy parts store is the clearest example there is. If it solves a problem you'll hit twice a year, hire the right gear those two times and buy the standard box.
One more thing worth checking before you go specialty: height. A lot of what people want a specialty unit for is really a headroom problem, and a high cube solves it for a fraction of the premium. The numbers are on our dimensions page.
Specialty availability moves week to week and it's not something to guess at from a website, including ours. Tell us what you're loading, how you're loading it and where it's going, and we'll tell you honestly whether you need a specialty unit or whether a standard container and a bit of thought will do the same job cheaper. Ring 0418 179 002 — seven days.
One call, one delivered number, seven days a week.