--- On Thu, 5/8/08, Tim Shoppa <tshoppa at wmata.com>

> That's not bad at all compared to some of the

> I've bought over Ebay. I've been pretty > disappointed > at some of the 50 or 70 pound lab instruments

> to be in perfect pristine condition before

> shipped

Some years back, I did a gig overseas. They had a pile of old laptops which they were giving out to anyone who wanted them because they were old ("here, take two, they're small"). I brought one back with me. The relevant part is that there was a bunch of stuff which I left with them to ship back - mostly fairly indestructible stuff like cables and such, but including some three or four more of those laptops. When that stuff arrived, it proved to have been just tossed into a box and shipped. Box not even close to full and no packing material at all. The only laptop in working shape was the one I brought back with me. (I kept the rest as parts machines....)

--- Doc Shipley <doc at mdrconsult.com> wrote: wrote: stuff that look they're A couple years ago, I bought a Heath/Zenith Z-19 terminal from eBay. I was in my house one day, and heard a loud >WHAM!< from the front door. Investigating, I found a large cardboard box on the porch, and a mark in the dust on the door where the box had hit it. They must have thrown the box to get it to hit the door like that, and make that much noise. The box was a thick walled computer monitor box, originally from a 17" ViewSonic. Inside, the terminal was very well packaged, with that stiff form-fitting instant foam-in-a-bag stuff (no, I don't know what it's called...) The terminal was intact externally, however some of the heavier parts had broken free inside. After a bit of cleaning, it worked fine. I still need to glue some of those internal mounting posts back on... With the treatment that UPS seems to give it's packages, I'm amazed that any gear ever arrives functional! On a side note, I once worked someplace where we dealt with computer equipment coming off lease. We basically handled the recovery and resale of it. We would ship out empty boxes full of packing material, complete with shipping labels for the return shipment. Customers would receive the box, pack the equipment with the supplied foam, and return it. Simple, right? For computer monitors, we shipped out large 20x20x20 boxes. Inside was enough foam packing material to fill the box - without the monitor inside. It was resiliant, soft foam, in chunks and sheete. Probably not the best packing material in the world, but decent. I think maybe 75% of the monitors were not useable by the time they got back to us. In most cases, they were just poorly packed. Which doesn't seem possible considering we supplied plenty of material to pack them in. Some arrived with the monitor simply tossed into the box, with no effort made to put the packing material around it. (Screen up, shoved in). Others came back with almost no packing material at all - even though the box was full when it left. Other boxes arrived with the monitor, screen against the bottom of the box, foam thrown on top of it. Shattered monitor housings, broken picture tubes, we got it all. The ones that survived were packed properly - monitor wrapped in the supplied plastic bag, with foam on all sides, wedged securely into the box with the monitor in the center. Also, with companies that were returning a lot of equipment, we would send individual boxes for everything - even laptops. Laptop boxes were smaller, sturdier, and included plenty of foam as well. Since the machines were being returned with their carrying case most of the time, they survived fine, regardless of packing. But, we also got things back "combined" into the monitor box or PC box. Laptops crushed by the 17" monitor they were mispackaged with. Two PC's crammed into a box intended for one, etc. No amount of instructions and supplied materials are enough for some people. -Ian

How's this for a horror story? A few months back, I bought a really nice IMSAI dual 8" floppy drive system from someone on eBay. It set me back $2000.00. A couple of weeks later, it shows up at my doorstep via FedEx ground in a disturbingly small box. I quickly open it up to find that, other than a sheet of bubble wrap thrown on top, there was no packing at all. And as a result, the drive had taken quite a beating in transit, resulting in one of the drive doors being crushed beyond repair (http://web.mac.com/mardy/iWeb/floppy.jpg). An irreplaceable piece of computing history destroyed because someone was too lazy to properly pack it.

Marden P. Marshall wrote: I think that's the horror story right there (paying $2000 for the drive). When it arrived damaged, did the seller refund your money? Did you have the money in escrow?

I'm not going to bother debating the value of this particular item with you. That would be a moot point. As for the seller ponying up to the bar and taking responsibility, the answer is that so far he has not.

So basically, the sellers who accepted escrow deals weren't the ones with whom we needed the escrow protection. No big surprise.

Hindsight is a wonderfully useless thing.

Analyzing my own mistakes is indeed useful and imperative. Analyzing someone else's mistakes on the basis of incomplete understanding of the circumstances data - that profits nobody.

As for the seller ponying up to the bar and taking responsibility, the answer is that so far he has not.

--- "Marden P. Marshall" <mardy at voysys.com> wrote: Calcomp disk drives used by DEC for the RX01. If you send me a better picture of it, or check the labelling on the drives, I might be able to verify this. There is a fellow in town who quite likely has a scrap drive -- I've seen a lot of the later RX02s that have been scrapped for motors and heads in his shop. --Bill

Just in case you're interested, we've had the Anglia TV film crew here at the Centre for Computing History today, and they *should* be running it on the Anglia news tonight at 6pm. I'll record it and post it online if there's any interest!

Is there anyone local to Cambridge (UK) interested in being involved with the museum?

Every time I've trusted a freight company to palletize and ship me SGI stuff from dovebid, I've gotten stuff that was damaged and in some cases not even packed the way the freight company told me they would pack it.

The only shipping company that can be trusted so far is Craters & Freighters. And gee, they are a company that was founded to handle the needs of shipping fragile art and electronics. What a surprise!

In article <48231670.5010909 at mdrconsult.com>, Doc Shipley <doc at mdrconsult.com> writes:

Expandable foam, form fitted to the unit seems to work the best. After that, packing peanuts when used properly work well. Anything less than that and you're asking for stuff to arrive smashed and busted because of the weight of the CRT.

In article <142532.86927.qm at web30605.mail.mud.yahoo.com>, David Comley <david_comley at yahoo.com> writes: This isn't the first time someone has made a slam on packing peanuts, yet I've had plenty of things sent and recieved with peanuts and had no problems. I think the key is to not just dump the peanuts into the container, but to physically compress them into the box. The flaps of the box should require some pressure to fully close around the item. If done properly, peanuts will not leave a loose void for things to wiggle around inside. I just opened some ebay purchases last night and two of them were damaged. Neither one of the damaged items used peanuts. In fact, of all the damaged items I've received off ebay, not a single one of them used peanuts.

I'd bet most of your stuff weighs less than 40 pounds, then.

I collect PDP-8 gear, which generally weighs close to the weight limit for a UPS (or even a Fed-Ex) package. You won't get good results with a PDP-8/e or an RK05 drive with peanuts. I've seen it attempted. Hard foam, custom shaped, is the thing to use for heavy packages. The only void should be the one just surrounding the delicate switch register switches.