How Much Weight Can a 28 mm Lean Pipe Hold?
A 28 mm lean pipe with 1.0 mm wall thickness carries 60.6 kg as a uniformly distributed load across a 1,000 mm simple span. The same pipe carries 118.0 kg at a 600 mm span and 26.9 kg at 1,500 mm. The drop is not proportional: past about 1,000 mm, deflection governs and capacity falls with the square of the span, so doubling your span leaves you with roughly a quarter of the load, not half.
Most lean pipe suppliers publish a single "load capacity" number with no span, no wall thickness and no deflection limit attached to it. That number is unusable. Capacity in a pipe and joint system is a function of three variables - wall thickness, span, and how much sag you are willing to accept - and this page gives you all of them, calculated rather than guessed.
Figures below are the allowable uniformly distributed load in kilograms for a single 28 mm OD tube simply supported at both ends, using the L/200 deflection limit. Where strength governs rather than deflection, the lower of the two values is shown.
| Wall thickness | 400 mm span | 600 mm span | 800 mm span | 1000 mm span | 1200 mm span | 1500 mm span |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.8 mm | 144.7 | 96.5 | 72.4 | 49.6 | 34.4 | 22.0 |
| 1.0 mm | 177.0 | 118.0 | 88.5 | 60.6 | 42.1 | 26.9 |
| 1.2 mm | 207.9 | 138.6 | 103.9 | 71.2 | 49.4 | 31.6 |
| 1.5 mm | 251.5 | 167.7 | 125.8 | 86.1 | 59.8 | 38.3 |
| 2.0 mm | 317.6 | 211.7 | 158.8 | 108.7 | 75.5 | 48.3 |
Below roughly 1,000 mm of span, the tube fails by bending stress: capacity falls in inverse proportion to span, so a 600 mm span carries 1.33x what an 800 mm span does. Above 1,000 mm, deflection takes over - the tube is still far from breaking, but it sags - and capacity falls with the square of span. This is the single most useful thing to know when you are drawing a frame, because it tells you which lever to pull.
This is the decision that costs people the most money, and the table above settles it. Take a 1,200 mm span carrying a distributed load.
Compare the two ways to increase capacity on that 1,200 mm span. Upgrading the tube from 0.8 mm to 2.0 mm wall raises capacity from 34.4 kg to 75.5 kg - a 2.2x gain - while the tube itself becomes about 2.4x heavier and noticeably more expensive. Splitting the same span with one vertical post in the middle gives you two 600 mm spans at 96.5 kg each, or 193 kg of total capacity: 5.6x the original, for one extra tube and two joints. The post wins on both capacity and cost, and it is the fix experienced fitters reach for.
Useful for shipping estimates and for working out whether your frame will still be movable once it is built.
| Wall thickness | kg per metre | kg per 4 m length |
|---|---|---|
| 0.8 mm | 0.54 | 2.15 |
| 1.0 mm | 0.67 | 2.66 |
| 1.2 mm | 0.79 | 3.17 |
| 1.5 mm | 0.98 | 3.92 |
| 2.0 mm | 1.28 | 5.13 |
These recommendations already include a 30% derating for joint flexibility and incidental impact, so you can use them directly instead of doing the maths yourself.
| Span | 25 kg | 50 kg | 100 kg | 150 kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 600 mm | 0.8 mm | 0.8 mm | 1.5 mm | 2.0 + support |
| 800 mm | 0.8 mm | 0.8 mm | 2.0 mm | 2.0 + support |
| 1000 mm | 0.8 mm | 1.5 mm | 2.0 + support | 2.0 + support |
| 1200 mm | 1.0 mm | 2.0 mm | 2.0 + support | 2.0 + support |
| 1500 mm | 1.5 mm | 2.0 + support | 2.0 + support | 2.0 + support |
Published so you can check them, and so you know where they stop being true.
What the model does not include. Lean pipe joints are not rigid nodes; they rotate slightly under load and typically add 10-20% to the theoretical deflection. A load concentrated at mid-span deflects the tube about twice as much as the same weight spread evenly. Any application with repeated impact - cartons arriving at the end of a flow rack, a cart crossing a floor joint - is working the frame harder than a static calculation suggests. For these reasons, treat the table values as upper bounds and design to 60-70% of them.
If your frame has to hold a specific weight at a specific span and you would rather not do the arithmetic, send us the two numbers and we will size it for you.
A 1.0 mm wall, 28 mm OD lean pipe carries 60.6 kg as a uniformly distributed load over a 1,000 mm simple span, limited by the L/200 deflection rule. The same pipe carries 118 kg over 600 mm and 26.9 kg over 1,500 mm. Capacity does not fall in a straight line with span - it drops with the square of span once deflection governs, so doubling the span leaves you with roughly a quarter of the capacity.
Yes for light assembly benches with spans under 800 mm and distributed loads: a 0.8 mm pipe carries 96.5 kg at a 600 mm span and 72.4 kg at 800 mm. It is not enough for long spans, heavy tooling, or any load that lands at one point - a point load at mid-span produces about twice the deflection of the same weight spread out, so a 0.8 mm pipe that is fine at 70 kg distributed will visibly sag at 35 kg concentrated.
Add a support. Going from 0.8 mm to 2.0 mm wall on a 1,200 mm span raises capacity from 34.4 kg to 75.5 kg - about 2.2x - while the tube itself gets roughly 2.4x heavier. Splitting that same 1,200 mm span with one vertical post at the centre gives you two 600 mm spans at 96.5 kg each, or 193 kg total: 5.6x the original capacity for the cost of one extra tube and two joints.
Use 1.2 mm or 1.5 mm for the roller track beams if the rack is loaded with dense metal parts, and 1.0 mm to 1.2 mm for cartons under 20 kg. Flow racks see repeated impact as cartons arrive at the stop end, so take the table values and apply a 0.7 derating factor rather than designing to the raw number.
Because the rating assumes rigid end supports. In a real pipe and joint frame the connectors are not perfectly rigid and rotate slightly under load, typically adding 10-20% to the calculated deflection. Joints that were not torqued to 8-10 Nm on the M6 bolt, or that were re-used many times, add more. This is why the working figures here are derated by 30%.