开云体育

I purchase cardboard boxes from a local supplier that specializes in paper products and shipping supplies. There is usually one or more such companies in any moderately metropolitan area. For reference, here in all of south western Oregon, regional population is a well under 200,000. Often these companies also carry janitorial supplies and deliver.

The cardboard boxes I use by choice are designated for heavy items. For some items shipped overseas, I use double wall. I completely line them with 1.5 to 2" polystyrene foam (because it's softer than the rigid sheets) cut from 4x8 sheets of residential insulation (from Home Depot). Faces, with any type of display and/or knobs get spacers to minimize the possibility of their damage from that side of the package getting mashed. After protecting the face, I literally roll the unit up in three layers (sometimes more if necessary) of 24" bubble wrap, which I purchase in a roll that's about 4 to 5 feet in diameter from the same place I get boxes. I use lots of Duck brand clear packing tape in the wrapping process in order to turn the bubble wrapped item into a modern plastic mummy. I use enough bubble wrap to make sure the mummy fits snugly into the foam lined box.

I do charge for this. I don't make a profit on packing, but I want my time (at dock labor rates, not bench rates) and expenses covered. This is made clear up front.

I have successfully shipped expensive collector grade professional and home audio equipment, some with vacuum tubes, to SE Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK as well as around the US and Canada. I have also shipped to S. America, which I no longer do because the buyers I have encountered are a PITA and the customs personnel in many countries there are completely untrustworthy.

If the equipment I am shipping has vacuum tubes, I will either remove them and individually wrap each and place them inside a small box that is included within the main box, or I will custom build a unit enclosing inner cardboard box and line it with shaped soft foam that holds all tubes snugly in their sockets. I recently did that for a pair of 5 (five!) channel 56 year old recording mixers that have a street value of about $5000.00 each. I did add 1/4" plywood sheet to the inside of the cardboard walls for that package. One shipment packed thusly, in 20+ years of doing shipping, had contents so damaged as to render it junk. The fork lift tine hole in the side of the box that a flashlight could clearly show penetration of more than half way trough the steel chassis packed inside was evidence enough for the insurance adjuster to authorize a full value claim. Some times it doesn't matter how well you pack something. If the baggage handler pushes your box out of the bay door of a 747 without having a conveyor or stairs in place, it probably wont matter how well you packed it.

Thomas Garson
Aural Technology, Ashland, OR
By my calculation, the dynamic range of the universe is roughly 679dB,
which is approximately 225 bits, collected at a rate 1.714287514x10^23 sps.