advice needed on shipping anvil from UK to Indonesia
I need to move an anvil from the UK (Bourne, Lincolnshire) to Bali. It belonged to my father and with my brother moving to Malta the anvil needs to be moved here to Indonesia or be thrown away. It does have sentimental value and its still in good usable condition. Weight is 80 kg of forged steel. a bit more if strapped to a pallet. New value GBP800. A well known moving company in the UK have quoted GBP 1800 (plus) to ship it to Indonesia. I assume the figure has been picked at random. Many moons ago a shipper in Yemen told me air freight would be cheaper, faster and more direct. Does anyone have any thoughts on a good way to move this relatively unwieldy object?
As I say its got sentimental value but at the quote I have so far I can have a new one from the USA delivered and still have change from GBP 1800.
Cpould you not dig a very deep hole in the back garden in the UK. If you drop the anvil in it should come out somewhere in the Antipodes. It doesn't matter where, shipping costs will be a lot less than from here to there
Location: A Whilom nimble brain. With 31 million posts.
Age: 73
Posts: 3,377
Let me give you some advice. Leave it behind. Take a photo of it, by all means, even have an artist do an oil painting of it, but leave the material object for others to lug.
I had to leave a Whitfield safe in the house. I'd bought it to comply with the firearms thingies, but it was a grand old thing and made such lovely clunking noises when you turned the handle. I couldn't move it, so the new owner got it for nowt.
Now, I'm sooooooooo glad I don't have that to worry about.
Last summer I finally parted with my mother's chairs. A bloke in HK recognized them for what they were and put the money in my bank without even seeing them. A 7'6" sideboard in solid oak was carried out under my sad gaze, and is now in a fine old priory. I had to let go.
The chairs my mother re-covered when she was a girl, and the sideboard I said I'd never sell. I thought I might put a pitched roof on it and live in it if things got bad.
Tonnes of stuff. Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of stuff, and it's cost me thousands to store it. Slowly the things I held on to don't seem as important anymore. Photos are all I need, and the letters written by my father in the war, that kind of thing.
Mind you, I do have my mother's Record plane here. I've told the kids they have to keep it in the family. But an anvil. Think of the hernias you'll avoid by leaving it behind.
The obvious thing is for him to ask a couple of airfreight forwarding companies to quote for the job - including palletising it and handling cleareance at his end.
However I'm years out of touch with the companies involved. Anyone got any recommendations for a freight forwarding company specialising in UK-Indonesia?
Back in my chemical days I was lucky and never had any problems with customs sampling, but I remember a couple of amusing incidents that affected others I dealt with. One concerned a shipment of sodium metal sticks. These came packed in heavy steel cans, covered in oil, sometimes each sodium stock was covered in a metal foil (tin?) as extra protection. Shipment arrived at ferryport on truck. Customs insisted on taking sample. Driver complained and was threatened with arrest. "OK" says driver, you take the sample, I'm going for a walk while you do it Customs opens box, selects can, removes sodium sample. cant seal can so takes it into portacabin office while they go to find driver 30 minutes later, Customs finds driver and drags him back to portacabin, except....portacabin is now a smoking heap with a fire engine in attendance
Similar problem with a railway truck full of tributyltin hydride, on its way from Germany to Spain. This stuff is a pyrophoric liquid, and was shipped in big armoured containers that looked like daleks. To extract the stuff you used stainless steel pressure lines and blew the stuff out with oxygen-free nitrogen. Spanish customs wanted a sample so the wagon was uncoupled and taken into the customs shed. Being knowledgeable they didn't bother with pipes or gas blanketing. A set of stillsons fitted the valve, so a sample was taken and put into a plastic bottle. Sample left on analysts desk while a typical Spanish lunch was taken Two hours or so later customs returned to their shed. What shed .....Oh that smoking ruin over there...
Look for someone who is shipping a load of stuff to Bali, (What you doing there? My brother is there for eighteen months.) Put it in their container, offer a few buck. Containers shipped by the unit and max wt. If they aren't up to max wt it costs them nothing extra to put your anvil in.
Most people hand down a bible or two, an anvil is a little extreme, but you're right, I'd want to hang on to it too. Good anvils hard to come by.
Nevermind
[/IMG]
