How I Packed My Tascam 48 To Send To lo.fi.love...
As requested by cjacek, the AO Prime Minister of a more humane world for dinosauric audio gear in-transit, here is a pictorial display of how I packed my Tascam 48 that is soon to be lo-fi-love's, and hopefully it arrives in as nice a condition as it is at present...this is a great concern to me, and below is how I hopefully will abate that concern.
First off, we are talking about a very, very clean example of a 48-OB that is fully operational, serviced, aligned and calibrated.
Here are some pics:
Its a clean one...So...how to get it to lo.fi...
Fortunately I had some good packing materials on-hand from my parts 48 being sent to me as well as my parts 58. I hung on to all the parts 48 packing materials as the seller had basically created a caccoon out of styrofoam block...used a hot knife or soldering iron to make custom cutouts from the tape path and such...but I'm getting ahead of myself...
First I took the back and bottom feet off as well as the reel adapters...bagged them up. I'll wrap them in bubble pack in a separate box along with some other parts that lo.fi bought. Notice also that I taped the power cord along the side. I don't want the deck sitting on the cord...could damage the deck or the cord. Also I'm using blue "painter's" masking tape. Holds good enough but comes off easy and leaves no residue.
Then I wrapped the deck in a plastic bag. Helps to keep it from getting scuffed and also keeps it clean and dry. Poked a hole for the power cord so that could be tucked safely aside in the box.
Here is some of the packing materials from the parts 48...notice some dented in areas...those are spots where I could tell the parts deck was rubbing because the styrofoam wasn't the right shape...plus the parts deck wasn't in a bag. Anyway, I smacked those spots with a hammer to compress the styrofoam to reduce the pressure on those areas.
You can see further what I mean looking inside the box...you're looking at the impressions the back of the deck made in the styrofoam. see where the power cord was? No-no. Anyway, smacked out a spot for where the power cord comes out (and in the case of this pack job wraps around the side of the deck), as well as the I/O jacks and ACCESSORY port.
Ahhh...got it in there with all my spinal discs intact...(hint, I actually tipped the box on its side, set the deck on its bottom, slid it into the box and then tipped the box back onto its bottom, placing the deck on its back)
Filling it in...I stretched the plastic out around the rollers, especially the tension arms to avoid the dreaded tweaked 48 t-arm syndrome...
You can see the rack ears in there too...wrapped in saran-wrap to avoid scuffing.
All the styrofoam is in. The whole idea is to keep this 100lb. chunk from shifting around, so I carefully selected an amount of bubble pack to fill in the top, and then I really try to get the top of the box pushed together snug as I tape it.
Here's the inner carton now all sealed up. I
always tape across the seam of the box top and along the edge of the flaps...gives the box torsional rigidity which is very important for a package of this size and weight.
Here's the inner carton in the background with the outer carton in the foreground. Found an outer carton that is a great size. It isn't super-duty, but it is a double-wall box which is good.
I've got a bunch of closed-cell poly-foam blocking from other shipments. This is great stuff. Easy to cut with a steak knife. I didn't have enough to make a full pair of end-caps, but I could emulate that with what I had...
It ended up being a pretty good fit!
Now for the other side...
After getting the other side fitted, I pulled the blocks back out, stuffed corner pieces along the sides as well as blocking on the larger side surfaces. Then a poured in a bunch of packing peanuts. I'm not expecting the peanuts to do anything but help to stabilize the blocking and minimize shifting. Peanus do nothing else on a package of this size and weight. Also note the scoring along the top flaps. I scored each flap to accomodate the height of the blocking. Rather than compromise the blocking, I made the box taller. Cutting lightly with a utility knife so that you cut through the first layer but not all the way through...then you can bend the scored cardboard one way and then the other way. Makes a nice new bend but it still has some strength. I make sure to tape these corners well though to help reinforce.
And there you go! I put a piece of cardboard from another box on the top there to fill in the space left after raising the height of the box and hence shortening the flaps. Again, corners/edges taped well.
So now we have a firmly held deck nestled in a custom formed caccoon of styrofoam, and that caccoon is suspended in a custom fit closed-cell poly-foam cradle. The exterior skin is double-wall and everything is liberally taped. Went through an entire roll of packing tape for this job and its worth it. I'll ship it FedEx and have arrow labels put on the box to help keep the deck from being oriented face-down...it'll be fully insured and marked fragile...not that that will actually do anything.
Thanks to cjacek for this thread and the AO forum in general. Learned a lot about proper packing right here!
Okay lo.fi...here it comes!!