[Yaesu] Shipping haevy or expensive equipment - was 990 damage

[Steve Harrison]

At 09:54 AM 11/24/2007 -0600, Jim Miller wrote:
>This thread of shipping damage has had a lot of coverage on other reflectors
>and the melted down opinion was that if you want it to arrive undamaged that
>you do NOT use the USPS OR UPS for the shipping.  FedEx was the best in
>general

Two more ancient tales of woe by Fedex. In 1991, I was at a remote site in
New Mexico waiting for some equipment to arrive overnight express by Fedex.
Here came the truck, he opened the back door, and asked for help getting
the boxes out. That was because two guys were needed to hold the bottoms on
the boxes which had come apart because someone (Fedex always disclaimed
responsibility, even though the boxes were picked up from inside our plant
in Virginia) had let the bottoms of the boxes get soaking wet. Fortunately,
the equipment was wrapped in plastic and there was lots of foam insulation
that kept the water from getting to the equipment.

Spin forward to 1994: we were in Hawaii and had shipped a whole 40 foot
trailer full of all sorts of equipment to the Big Island. We went to the
Fedex depot with our own truck to pick it all up. One of Hawaii's famous
gully washer rain squalls started up and within a few minutes, you couldn't
see the street from Fedex's front door.
"We're here to pick up shipment blahblahblah."
"Lemme see where it is."
Minutes tick by.
"OK, we've found part of it over here in the warehouse."

We load up what they had in the warehouse.

"Where's the rest of it? We shipped it all over inside a trailer just so it
would all be together. And WE were supposed to unload the trailer as we
packed it First-In, Last-Out and needed to load it into our truck as we
packed it into the trailer."

"Still looking."

More minutes tick by and the rain squall passes.

Finally: "OK, we've found the rest, it's out there in the lot under that
shed roof."

Fedex had a large roof out over part of their rear parking area with no
sides, packed tight with cardboard boxes. We walked out there; all boxes
were soaking wet from rain blowing under the shed roof. We found our boxes,
soaking wet, laying in puddles on the ground; we were HIGHLY pissed off as
all the boxes had been on pallets back at our plant; the Fedex lady had no
idea who'd taken them off the pallets nor why. We had to rip the individual
boxes open, remove the equipment and put it into our truck; took us nearly
4 hours versus the half hour it would have taken to move the original
packed pallets.

I've tried DHL several times with no problems so far. I also have never had
a problem with USPS except that if a box looks like it's "leaking"
something, they'll quarantine it until you come down and explain what the
"wet" spot might be. They did that with a box for me from Japan that
arrived with what looked like an oily spot on the top; turned out not to
have been related to the contents of my own box at all but they made me
open the box in the post office quarantine area so they could make certain
it hadn't "contaminated" other boxes it had touched.

Steve, K0XP