The Steel Guitar Forum

Sorry Jim, but they should have been sent in a shipping tube. That is not the way to pack rods. I get rods in all the time from Mcmaster in tubes and never had a problem.

Schedule 40 stainless steel with welded endcaps.

It's really no big deal at all as they are simply .0125" rods (there was other stuff in the box) sent to me but I thought that someone saw the "Do Not Bend" sign and decided that it must have really meant "Please Bend" .

"Do not bend" to UPS guys means "Bend this".

Welcome to the club Jim. 200 feet of 7/64 stainless in here. I was able to salvage about half. Your mistake was putting "do not bend" on the package. That is a challenge to those guys. Martin.

I am not defending UPS, I have nothing to do with them, but..

Shipments must be packed to survive a conveyor and a 3 or 4 ft. fall. There are no people in-between the trucks. Labeling a package may benefit a driver out on delivery .

I have received countless "TUBE" packages with never any damage, but I have filed claims on very small packages where they weigh maybe 3 or 4 pounds and get crushed on the line.

Is there UPS and FED EX damage ?, sure, but in the scheme of things there is never 100% success for either carrier,some things are going to get trashed.

So the next question is...

How many didn't get trashed in the same period as the box above, which actually , as mentioned, should have been in a tube ?

I ship approx 300 packages/year , I file maybe 4 or 5 claims/year at best, which is what I expect. I wish it was 100% success but it's not.

A week or two back I paid UPS $600 to ship 3 large heavy boxes for the company I work for, overnight delivery over a weekend.

When I checked the tracking they rescheduled for 2nd day Air rather than overnight. I called UPS and spoke with the shift Supervisor and said sure go ahead , but you owe me $210 if the boxes don't get there today,I paid for overnight, you don't get to keep the money for overnight. They delivered the 3 boxes that afternoon. My take was they just didn't want to send another truck out to deliver the 3 large boxes which were there at the hub , and they would not have if I didn't call.

expect some failure, because it will happen.

t

Jim
If you look very closely on your carton, you will find someone has written on it in very small writing.....Oh yes it does!

I'm really not condemning UPS - it was just humorous to me to see and I wanted to share . I get things all the time that are not damaged and rods should not be sent this way.

I've had the same problem but with us as the shipper.

I now send out rods taped to a piece of scrap maple about 3/4" x 3/4" inside the packaging. That seems to have stopped the problem.

I got new pedal rods (1 inch longer) for my Franklin. Paul (Sr) sent them out taped to a piece of wood, like John mentioned.

But, I agree that you need to package assuming it will get "crushed" rather than hope it doesn't. I get comments about "over packing".

Whenever I ship something long and skinny, it goes in a piece of 3" PVC pipe. Bend-proof, break-proof, water-proof, crush-proof, and pretty much "goof proof".

Jim - next time, bend them before you send them. Then perhaps they will be delivered straight!!

I had a friend who worked for ups a have heard some scary stories about what happens to packages in their warehouses. A "fragile" sticker seems to frequently be taken as a challenge.

In the early 80's I worked at UPS at night packing trucks while going to school during the day. During the Christmas season, there were a lot of baked goods and candy sent - one lady who was sending cookies to her relatives wrote a note on the box requesting to handle with care:

"Dear Mr. UPS man, this box contains Christmas cookies, and we would like them to arrive in good condition - please handle with care - THIS MEANS YOU!"

Well, those last 3 words weren't exactly the right thing to add - one of the guys read it and said, "This means me, huh?" and proceeded to drop kick the box across the length of the truck trailer. Some of the things I witnessed there would make me reconsider ever sending anything of value through them.

I wasn't really meaning to start a UPS tirade- it was really just the humor of package writing and the results. I'm sure that DHL/FedEX/UPS, etc- all the major shippers- have problems and I totally understand. I am grateful to have them and use them regularly- and attempt to insure everything I send .

Hello to you Jim....I'm glad the steel I played while visiting your store had good rods. All though I might have sounded better with bent ones(ha)....Ron

This thread has given me a few chuckles..bent rods, playing a steel with bent rods etc..bent..Bent; get it hahaha!
Sometimes this Bent has a hard time keeping things straight

Hey Jim,

With those rods, you could start putting new pedals up the legs of the steel...knee-rods...LOL.

Hope you're doing well!!

Funny, I was just in Jim's shop in Oceanside a few weeks ago and we were discussing the perils of shipping fragile items!

In response to Tony Prior's post: In my humble opinion, it is true that fragile/breakable/bendable items should be packed accordingly. But the shipper's method of moving items in the warehouse should be adjusted accordingly to what is written on the package.

"Fragile" means "take extra special care that this does not fall off the conveyor belt", "Do not Bend" means, well, make sure it doesn't bend!

+1 they should have been shipped in a tube of course.