Sending of heavy items

Gentlemen, do forum members have any advice on costs of dispatching compact but heavy items, for example electric motors or machine vices both come in around two & a half stone & delivery pricing is more than the items are worth. Discuss.

2.5 stone is not a useful weight to quote in a metricated world!

UPS will ship a 30kg parcel for around £15

look at uk.interparcel.com or www.parcel2go.com

Edited By Gray on 08/04/2019 09:10:47

I just saw a post on the home workshop site asking about cost of sending a 4 jaw chuck to Salisbury. Apparently the packaged item weighed 90 kg? Not sure how big a chuck that is, or how heavy a box.

Delivery is delivery, there is a cost involved whether you go pick it up yourself or engage a courier. Some firms are cheap, and your parcel may arrive damaged if not at all. Some firms are expensive but reliable.

You pays your money, you takes your chance.

Have a look at "parcel compare", all the big couriers are listed there. I was going to get a 42kg vertical head collected and delivered for £28. In the end the nice man said he would keep it for two months until I was passing nearby, on my way to a holiday cottage. Added a couple of nights in a nice village pub b & b, that made the head not quite such a bargain!!......but kept "she" happy. lol.

Edited By Pete White on 08/04/2019 09:15:37

Must be cheap motors and vices

I just put 15kg and a 30cm cube into Parcel2go and got prices from £5-12 even parcel force are around the £8 mark.

It is the overall cost of the item that I consider, not just the shipping cost. If delivery for a cheap second hand item is greater than I paid for the item, so be it. It’s not rocket science. Sometimes paying more for the item but with local collection is the better/cheaper option.

Though if you haven't a working home printer and or are no longer employed where there is one you can't print the label

Do check carefully when looking at courier delivery costs. I recently shipped two items, one 7kg, the other 14kg. In both cases the initial prices that popped up on Parcel2go looked very good £8 and £9 respectively. However insurance for £200 more than doubled the cost, then VAT added another 20%, so final costs were £20 odd.

Dave

If you are in UK you can use the local library

Roy

Same with our library here,great service great staff,great help for us old sods who can,t work these printers,copiers,ect. Just ask them nicely and the do the rest.

I use Hermes for up to 15kg.

Much cheaper and they collect.

Jim

I always go to Parcels 2 Go. They list about a dozen parcel delivery firms. The quoted prices are usually less than half quoted by the firms themselves on their own web sites. Even after you have factored insurance an VAT into the equation. I organised a pick up and delivery to my address for an item weighing around 30 kgs. Price was about £18 including £100 insurance an VAT. Don't know how they do it for so little.

Andrew

I very recently went to order an endmill from a well known supplier and the postage at the checkout has now gone up to £10 postage (£5 for the cutter) so I didn't bother. (£3 a month ago)

Reminds me of the time I ordered an air tool and was quoted £30 postage as 'Your destination is very expensive to send to'. I paid as I needed it.

Was not impressed when it turned up in a small box with a £2.40 franked label on it.

Paul

Quiet agree. I live in an isolated part of the NW of England and if the opportunity arises to buy things locally I do, finding it cheaper to pay a premium on the item and save fuel/miles and travel/subsistence costs, not to mention time.

Guy

Just when I learn about a thing called "Metric" someone mentions "stone". Whose stones did they use? How did this come about? .

Just when I learn about a thing called "Metric" someone mentions "stone". Whose stones did they use? How did this come about? .

It's simple Mark - a 'Stone' was defined as a rock or large pebble the size of a clenched mans fist. It was almost certain that in faraway days they had big hands from toiling in the fields! That translated to 14 pounds in a stone, and 2 stones made a 'quarter' (28 lbs), 4 stones became a half hundred weight (written '1/2 cwt' with 8 stones being a hundred weight (1 cwt, at actually 112lbs!). It's still used in the UK as being the terminology for body mass, surprisingly even youngsters are still using it. So a persons weight will be defined as say 14 stone 5lb.

If anyone asks you about the differences in the US gallon and the Imperial gallon that came about as a result of the US maintaining the 'old' weights and measures system of Queen Anne post the revolution. In the UK the government taxed wines and ales by the pint, so the victuallers increased the 'size' of the pint from 16 fluid ounces to 20 fluid ounces. Hence the USA stayed with the 16 fl. oz. pint and we went with the new tax busting 20 fl. oz.

Youngsters might still be using imperial measures for their weight and height, but are only taught metric units at school. They are taught how to convert at about year 10, but by then the irks that don’t want to learn are so far behind the curve that conversions are probably like a foreign language to them.

It is often just passed on from their (poorly?) educated parents and journalists who refuse to metricate. Many youngsters have no idea how many pounds in a stone or inches in a foot. Possibly down to weighing scales that are really old and only have imperial units in large letters. Tape measure manufacturers are also to blame - there are still tapes with imperial measures on the top edge, with metric placed awkwardly below.

Students buy expensive calculators to convert, if they have to. Or just ask google or siri. A fair proportion cannot convert from the 12 hour clock to the 24h one. Even Joe Public have to change the clocks, twice a year, at 01:00h (or 1 am) to avoid errors, although that at least means the time change is completed on one single day!

In model engineering, the scales are so much more simple to use when down-sizing the imperial measurements from the original imperial items. Metric does not so easily lend itself to 12:1 scale conversions as 10 only has useful scaling factors of 2 and 5 and 10. But I know which is the easier for metric measurements of either a 10th or a 12th scale model!

Kit suppliers, like Hemingway, still provide the original plans in imperial units (but egine capacities are often metric). It will work its way out of the system eventually, but it may take a long time yet - what with market traders still often working in pounds weight!

At least most SI units make sense in that calculations of derived units are all standardised and most are decimalised.

Ask the average student to manually add up cwts quarters, stones, pounds and ounces and see how they get on! Roll on metric road signs! Who uses density of ponds per cubic foot on here?

I know a lot of the conversions but still generally use metric units ( even though I have to remember that 40 thous cut is about 1mm until I put a dro on my old imperial lathe. Miles per gallon is my one weakness - but once we change to kilometres, mpg will be put aside with no problems.

We've been metric/imperial for years.

Cars are a prime example!!! Mix of inch and mm on tyres.

Jim

.

^^^ Not quite that simple

Here is a good concise summary: **LINK**

https://www.anacreofpints.com/the-stone-weight/

MichaelG.

PSI ? I dare not think what the metric equivalent is, let alone use it in any meaningful way. My boiler calcs are all in psi, lengths in inches and I grew up in a metric world. There is room for both....just dont tell the american space telescope makers!