7 Oct
2013
7 Oct
'13
7:35 a.m.
On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
I once had an RP06 pack shipped to me, which arrived
in a large cardboard
box filled with styrofoam peanuts. The pack had sunk to the bottom corner
(pushing all the peanuts out of the way) and had one platter bent up about half an inch.
Sad but not surprising, given the packing "job".
Sawdust would be a bad idea. It will make a mess, it
isn't very springy, and it
will shift out of the way just like the peanuts in my RP06 example.
Yep. It "flows" too well.
You need materials that will stay where you put them.
This is part of the reason for double-boxing items - even packing around the
inner box can't migrate around as it would if it were loose packing around
an irregular object. Density and footprint are another part of the equation.
A bare VT-100 surrounded by 5" of peanuts will compress the ones on the
bottom as the box is handled. The compression leaves a void that is filled
by peanuts creeping up the sides, turning the whole carton into a "peanut
pump", leaving the terminal in the corner of the box and all the peanuts on
top, like your RP06 pack. One benefit of the double box is to increase the
footprint and spread the load over more peanuts, lowering the amount of
compression. The other benefit is that it's easier to tell that you need to
toss some more in on top to have some compression of the top layer,
reducing the void and lowering the pumping action. I have no idea what
the critical pounds-per-square-inch number is for peanuts, but there is
a number, and things with CRTs and linear power supplies routinely
exceed it, necessitating additional measures (foam corners, mixed
packing media, etc).
I was once told by someone who worked at UPS that you should pack
your boxes as if you were going to toss them out of a car moving 30 mph.
They have a conveyor in the depot that moves that fast and is 4' off the
ground. Stuff falls off of it every day.
-ethan