Shipping tires and wheels cross country

[papadoc]

Having just gone through the exercise to ship wheels and tires from California to Massachusetts, I thought it would be worthwhile to post this for future reference for anyone needing to do the same. Kday now has my OEM 9 spoke wheels and Continental Extreme Contact DW setup to run until the snow falls in the Northeast.

Shipping options are varied and when first researched, way more than anticipated- $380 was the cheapest UPS quote I could find. Well, let me recommend ShipNEX, http://www.shipnex.com. Their quote came in at $212 and furthermore, the shipping was still via UPS! By the way, tire and wheel combo weighed in at 56 pounds.

Next item was to figure out how to ship. Kevin suggested cardboard on the ends, and a glance at other forums suggested this would work.

Before putting cardboard over the wheels, two layers of small bubble wrap to protect the rims from any more scrapes than the curb rash I picked up in the 8+ years on these wheels.

Then cardboard circles to cover the wheels. Put two layers over the outer rim and one on the inner wheel.

Finally, wrapped the wheels in mover's stretch plastic wrap and attached shipping label from ShipNEX to the outside of the wheel.
Scheduled pickup online and UPS showed up and a week later, Kday had the packages delivered as scheduled.

Would have to suggest ShipNEX, as recommended on other forums, as they actually ended up using UPS for a significant discount vs. standard UPS. Hope this will be of some use to somebody in the future.

[kday]

Yes, this worked out great. I would definitely recommend this shipper & Papadoc as a seller. Great packaging job & a pleasure to deal with.

They've been getting some admiring comments in the office too. Who would have thought tires were such a conversation piece?

[ttboost]

Boy, looks fairly easy..but they do look a little beat up...I wonder what they would look like if there was another day or 2 of shipping?

[kday]

Only the rubber is exposed and that's pretty stout. The cardboard protecting the wheel faces is all intact. I haven't unpackaged them yet but I don't expect them to be any worse for wear.

[ttboost]

Yes..I can see that they are in one piece...I was just wondering if they had to be dragged around on another truck or two, how would that plastic look then..or would it all come apart? Probably be OK, just wondering...

[Bigglezworth]

Coughing up $10-15 for a roll of shrink wrap will make your packaging efforts top notch. Wrap 2-3 layers around something like a tire and you can drag them to kingdom come and back without problems (so to speak).

[papadoc]

Coughing up $10-15 for a roll of shrink wrap will make your packaging efforts top notch. Wrap 2-3 layers around something like a tire and you can drag them to kingdom come and back without problems (so to speak).

Well that was shrink wrap but not triple layers...next time! I figured that the tires might get exposed some but they are often shipped that way without wheels, so I did not think it would be a problem.