Shipping Dilemma

[Garrett Lowell]

I'm trying to take delivery of some alaskan yellow cedar from Lorne Oregon. I don't need much, 75 board feet. The cost of the wood for vg recycled old growth (100-150 rings per inch) is two dollars/board foot, no minimum. The wood costs me 150 bucks, and shipping is over 250! This from Oregon to Virginia. Anybody have any better ideas or suggestions?

[Donn]

How long are the pieces?

[John E Hardiman]

Buy a lot more and re-sell it. Just like Santa Claus you can make it (the shipping) up by volume.

[cs]

What we need is a cross continent chain of forumittes. Say get one to take it from point A to point B and another to pick it up there and take it to point C, and so forth until it gets to you. I volunteer for the Chattanooga portion.

Chad

[Garrett Lowell]

The pieces are 13' long.

[Garrett Lowell]

And, I can take delivery of it here at the office, so residential delivery is not a requirement.

[Donn]

13' pretty much limits you to LTL truck. If you could live with 6' pieces, you could use UPS.

[Garrett Lowell]

Ok, the shipping rate is a bit better; the guy miscalculated the weight. I ended up with 154.00 business to business, LTL, just like Donn said. This is shipping FedEX Freight. I guess it's the price of getting what you want, but thanks for all of the input.

[Alan D. Hyde]

Either FedEx or UPS (I can't remember which) will take lengths up to nine feet.

Alan

P.S. Make friends with an independent trucker (owner/operator), Garrett.

[ 06-23-2004, 02:52 PM: Message edited by: Alan D. Hyde ]

[Venchka]

You got a deal! $4.05/BF in your hand! I want some!

[Wooden Boat Fittings]

.
When shipping oversize goods (like boathooks) to the US, we always use TNT -- they're about half the price of FedEx or UPS, and at least as efficient. (Actually, having used FedEx once I'd say TNT is more efficient.)

Of course, their US pricing structure might reflect your US companies' higher prices too, I don't know. Might be worth investigating though.

TNT US

(Smaller parcels go by post, which is about half the price of US Mail as well, but isn't an option if you're mailing from outside Oz.)

Mike
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[Garrett Lowell]

Thanks, Mike, I will keep them in mind for the next boat!

[Don Olney]

UPS ships items up to 9' in length. However, if you have something a little longer to be shipped, say, 9' 6", you can most likely get away with it if your supplier declares the length as 9'.

I've had two pairs of 9' 6" oars shipped from Canada like this. In the event of a problem with UPS, I was going to argue that due to different systems of measurement, 9' 6" in Canada equals 9' in USA.