It’s 2022 and the biggest challenge facing CRT enthusiasts remains servicing and maintaining their highly valuable analog display sets. Nowadays there are not many CRT service shops around, and if you do find one more than likely they will not be in your area. This leaves you with a difficult decision. Should you pack up your CRT in your vehicle and drive 500 miles each way to the nearest CRT shop? That is the safest option, but it takes lots of time and leaves you with the costs to travel. It puts a lot of wear and tear on your vehicle too.
The other option may be scarier to think about. Should you ship your CRT to a shop? This sounds easy and will save a lot of time, but it will cost a lot. Not to mention the incredibly high risk that the shipping carrier damages your monitor while transporting it. There are countless horror stories littering the web about people shipping a CRT only to have it end up destroyed in the process. Even if you take the extra time to pack the CRT properly, there is still a better than 50% chance on average that your 19” or larger CRT will be damaged.
Unfortunately, we can no longer use standard ground shipping carriers to ship any CRT over 14” packed in a cardboard box. This means we need to move on to a more durable shipping container. Companies such as Uline as well as other commercial supply companies offer Wood Box Pallets. These pallet boxes come in many different sizes, and the costs for a larger monitor pallet box is about $100. Here is a link to the information on the boxes:
https://www.uline.com/BL_427/Standard-Wood-Crates?keywords=Wooden+Boxes
We used one of these boxes to transport a Sony PVM 20L5 from the Midwest USA to my shop on the East Coast in Virginia. The box held up perfectly and, the best part is that it is reusable! That will save you on having to pay to have the CRT shop repack your monitor after it has been serviced. You can not reuse a Cardboard box and be approved for shipping insurance, but the wood crate is different. It can be reused if it is in good shape after each shipping trip. These may be the perfect container to ship your CRT inside.
UPS, FedEx, DHL or other large ground carrier shippers should offer either ground shipment on the Pallet Box or they may offer LTL Freight. Of these two options, LTL will cost more and will be much safer than ground. I’m sure that eventually a ground carrier will break a CRT inside one of these crates, but you should be good to use ground if the carrier offers it since the crate will meet all insurance requirements. The other option is to contract the shipping with a smaller shipping business. A service like Uship.com can help coordinate your shipping job with professional carriers and this is by far the safest option to transport anything.
You can learn more about Uship Options here:
https://www.uship.com/
To see more on my shop’s experience with this Pallet Box, please check out this video: