I presume with a busy classified section and eBay that some of the Singletrack mind will have done this.

If so, how did you go about protecting the frame? Who/what did you use? What were the costs?

Cheers

KoB

Bubblewrap round the tubes, cut down bike box, lots of tape, Post Office.

Bish Bash Bosh, job jobbed. 🙂

Cheers Peter, roughly how much?

Avoid Parcel2go is all I have to offer.

£10-£15?

I posted some motorcycle leathers that weighed 13-14lb yesterday for £15.50-ish, a full bike is generally £25-30. I always use Parcelforce.

OK cheers, so £25 to £30, plus bubble wrap and tape £6, and the need to sort a bike box from a shop.

Avoid Parcel2go is all I have to offer.

Really? I’ve used them to send hundreds of frames and they’ve been very good.

Should cost less than £10 for mainland UK depending on service chosen. A frame box will be smaller than a cut down bike box. Newspaper will protect as well as bubble wrap.

Decent box – maybe even a LCD/plasma tv box from the cardboard dump at the tip would do.

Frame protection – bought 100m of bubblewrap off eBay for something daft like a fiver – that’s kept me for a while, and as a bonus if I ever get stressed I can cut off a metre of the stuff and just pop it all….

Parcelforce tends to be my preferred courier just ‘cos I iz lazy and it’s round the corner. £14.25ish for a frame (it’ll never go over the weight limit).

Depends on price of frame and the risk you take but the insurance ramps up fairly quickly. You’ll get the basic £50 or whatever back if it goes missing or broken if you don’t so up to you and you’re risk management on that one.

PS Do check the size of the box though. ‘Bike’ boxes are probably bigger dimensions than Parcelforce will take – you’ll need to cut it down. They won’t care if it weights 200g if it’s more than 2m long and 3m around the girth (or something like that) – it’s not actually that big a box for a frame/wheels.

Either horizontally or cut up into shredded wheat sized bits

So what courier is the most reliable/safest to use?

I’ve always used Parcelforce but Express24 became Express168 for me recently and was a whole heap of stress and hassle…they lost my frame once, found it again (after a lot of chasing by me rather than them), then sent it for noon the next day delivery but then failed on that as well. I was just grateful in the end that it got there at all and in one piece but I’m loathed to use them again.