Packing Fragile Things The hardest items to pack are the fragile ones and the more fragile the harder, as you may well imagine. Shape can also play a part in making it even more problematic. Imagine having to pack antiques, fine art, china, glass or even light bulbs for shipping, whether you will move them yourself or not. Bubble wrap is a great boon in this field. Formerly, fragile items were packed in newspapers and even straw. Indeed, newspapers are still used quite effectively by some packagers in order to save money although bubble wrap is fairly inexpensive. The easiest fragile things to pack for shipment or transport are flat objects like photographs and paintings. If the picture is framed, it is best to wrap it in two layers of bubble wrap and then insert it into a flat, corrugated cardboard box. There are different sized boxes which will hold one or several pictures and the boxes vary in area too. It is important that the contents of the shipping box fit closely inside and cannot rattle about inside. The more the contents can move, the more likelihood there is that the box will break and the contents will be lost or damaged. The further you are sending the items, the more important this rule is. If you are transporting oil paintings on canvas or water colours on paper, it is easier to roll them up slackly, perhaps around a rolled up newspaper and then insert the package into a cardboard or polystyrene tube. The tube might be round or triangular. Pack the ends of the roll to prevent it moving back and forth. Manufacturers encourage customers to hold onto all original packaging, but it does mount up if you do not have a lot of room. Whilst transporting televisions, monitors or microwave ovens, it is best to use the original polystyrene packing and the original cardboard container. If you do not have these items, you could buy a box to transport these items and you will have to wrap it in bubble wrap and pad the corners of the box with newspapers. If you are merely moving the TV from one house to a different one, you could wrap it in blankets and maybe place it in a box to stop it rolling around. If you would like to send or transport crockery, you can line a cardboard box with two layers of bubble wrap, wrap each plate in a sheet of newspaper and stack them in the box. Make sure that they cannot move from side to side with additional newspaper packing. A more expensive, but more professional way of doing this is to fill a box with polystyrene balls and slide the plates into it carefully. You can frequently buy the polystyrene balls by the sackful in outside markets. If you are anxious about newsprint coming off on the things in the box, you could purchase a large roll of recycled paper for not much money. Whatever you spend on
packaging when shipping to a customer, it is almost certainly a lot less than issuing a replacement. Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a number of |topics, but is now concerned with boxes for shipping art. If you want to know more go to Where Can I Buy Shipping Boxes?