best way to ship a lower unit

Lucky me I get to ship my 1.5 year old lower unit back to FL. Does anyone have any good pointers in how to do this? How do I package it, best way to ship it, anything like that would be helpful, thanks

Depending on size,
Smaller sized you may be able to get away with a heavy duty cardboard box and lots of packing support and packing around it. May be a good idea to take small garbage bags and fill them with spray foam around the unit to keep everything solid.

A Larger unit you’ll probably want to crate it up with 2x4s, 1/2” plywood, and screws. Ship via freight.

Either way definitely purchase insurance and tracking!!

If you need to ship it via freight, try to find someone or somewhere that can load and unload the pallet. Adding a lift-gate charge on freight is incredibly expensive.

404 ERROR wrote:

If you need to ship it via freight, try to find someone or somewhere that can load and unload the pallet. Adding a lift-gate charge on freight is incredibly expensive.

The one nice thing with just a lower unit is two people should be able to lift it into the back of a truck fairly easy. No need for a lift gate really.

This is a lower unit from a 90HP if that helps any

Only way to know for sure is to weigh it, but with a 90 HP lower unit plus container, I’m going to guess you’re above the weight where UPS/Fedex, etc will be a good option. You CAN send heavy items by UPS, Fedex, but they stick you with a hefty overage for weight above a certain point.

Cardboard isn’t going to work for an item that heavy. And BTW, you are probably going to have to drain the oil out of the lower unit due to shipping regs, just so you know it might be better to do that before you start packaging.

First off, get it packed and weighed. I’m going to guess you’re going to need to build a small crate, personally, I’ve built them out of 1/4 inch plywood and 1×4 lumber because that’s the cheapest, lightest weight stuff I could find. I then used big plastic zip ties to anchor the item (in my case, an engine block) to the bottom of the crate so it didn’t slide around and then filled the rest with packing and screwed on the lid.

Do a very good job on packing because heavy stuff gets handled with forklifts, etc and they’ll be doing whatever they can bust the sh!t out of your stuff. Also, the trucking companies LOVE to deny damage claims due to “insufficient packaging”, so avoid this cluster and pack very well.

I can see 2 options.

If you or a friend works at a company that does a lot of shipping, you can sometimes get super-cheap shipping by taking advantage of that company’s contract rates with carriers. Worth asking around because my wife used to be able to ship stuff by Fed or UPS for about half the standard rate.

Otherwise, I’ve used freightquote.com and XPO for heavy items. It takes about 15 minutes to set up an account with freightquote, but then you see a lot of options and savings can be significant. Then you can also schedule and track through the website, so it’s kind of one-stop shopping.

Grouse

munchy wrote:

The one nice thing with just a lower unit is two people should be able to lift it into the back of a truck fairly easy. No need for a lift gate really.

Good point.

I’ve shipped entire ATV engines before and did almost exactly what grouse said. Freightquote is really the way to go as a consumer. They make freight shipping almost as easy as dropping a letter in the mailbox.