[vcf-midatlantic] Received H11-a shipping mess!

[Richard Cini]

Herb —

	I’m happy to elaborate on the packaging because it ticks me off when non-vintage sellers sell vintage equipment and don’t take adequate care. Sometimes it works out fine; other times not. Arrrgh.

	The box was only marginally bigger than the unit, similarly rectangular and of not a particularly thick corrugated cardboard. There is only about 2” of buffer all around, and packed by the seller. The box contained a short string of air-filled bags (like you get from an Amazon order) and white (non-ESD) peanuts. The unit rested right on the bottom of the cardboard. The unit is lop-sided weight-wise (transformer weight) and there was not enough packaging to prevent movement of the unit within the box. The cards were not removed from the card cage for transit. 

	Based on the damage, I concluded that it was dropped/thrown on its bottom given how the plastic anchor holes sheared. The sides are made of a plastic material with holes which contain threaded brass inserts that the chassis pieces screwed into. 4 of the 10 anchor points were sheared during transit. I’m going to try to repair these with epoxy putty, but worse case I’ll build replacement sides using walnut or mahogany.

	Having said this, it looks like the unit survived electrically. The power supply is solid and there was no damage to the backplane connectors from the boards shifting during transit. I need to build a serial cable in order to test it operationally.

Rich

--
Rich Cini
Collector of Classic Computers
Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32






On 2/12/16, 11:29 AM, "vcf-midatlantic on behalf of Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic" <vcf-midatlantic-bounces at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org on behalf of vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

>Rich, congrats on your H11 purchase, sorry to hear about the shipping 
>problems but thanks for describing them in this discussion group. The 
>subject of packing is significant to me, and you've provided a 
>cautionary tale.
>
>I spend a lot of time and effort in packing stuff I sell, and I go to 
>great pains to explain to my customers why that's necessary. Some number 
>of them simply don't understand what packing is about, or seem to have 
>awareness of how fragile some vintage computers can be. That's 
>especially true for old CRT monitors, more so for color CRT monitors - 
>their plastic cases just crumble under stress.
>
>Rich, would you mind giving some further information about the packing 
>if you can, privately or in public reply?  Did the seller pack 
>themselves, or did the seller ask a shipping service to pack? And can 
>you give some idea of how little packing material there was? A simple 
>metric would be the thickness of any styrofoam between chassis and box, 
>if it was "peanuts" or solid styrofoam, etc.
>
>Some may think these are boring, nit-picky questions. Rich would likely 
>disagree that it's a boring subject. I'm trying to learn from his 
>experience.
>
>herb
>
>-- 
>Herbert R. Johnson,  New Jersey USA
>http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net