Wow that's quite the adventure I'm glad you finally got a working monitor. That second one was more heartbreaking than the first one due to the extra care your friend took in packaging it.

Very nice ! Enjoy at last!

It's all pure luck. They'll break a styrofoam block packed in foam covered with bubble wrap if they want to. Nothing withstands a few firm kicks or a drop from a certain height. Buyers also don't want to pay for the extra padding 90% of the time and a monitor needs lots of it. They refuse to pay more for a bigger box (=more expensive ship size category) that has extra space for PE foam. And some sellers are just lazy to pack things properly and packing a monitor needs proper materials, work and care.
I wouldn't ever ship anything fragile and especially not on Ebay because the seller almost automatically loses the item and his money if something goes wrong.
Local pickup only. I've seen a local shipping depo and it looked something like this.

The same with their shipping vans, the boxes are just thrown in. I asked the courier about it and he told me that it was done by the night shift who load the vans. Assholes.
I like the box-in-box method, looks much safer. But to be honest the rest of the packages were good too especially the second, I've had monitors shipped with way worse padding and none of them got damaged. And that's where luck comes into play. If your item is handled by an incompetent worker then it's going to break. If a good worker handles it then it's going to be fine. I don't know about your country but in Hungary there is a serious shortage of van drivers and warehouse workers so they'll hire anybody and I mean ANYBODY with a 1 day old driver's licence and 2 arms and legs. Some companies even pay for your driver's licence if you sign a contract with them. Quality is sacrificed because people don't want these jobs and experienced drivers go to better companies with higher pay.
The point is that it's a risk we all have to take when we want something fragile shipped. But nothing beats local pickup even if you have to wait a little longer to get the desired item.

This is one of the reasons I just don't like buying CRT's anymore. Two of the three CRT's I still have I managed to buy locally and both were in their original boxes and packing (one of them happens to be an IBM 5153!). The other I just got cheap enough that I could take a chance, and it was replacing another of the same model monitor that was itself in pretty rough shape - that's why I was replacing it. But I got lucky with it and it arrived fine (domestically, though).

The thing that really turned me off shipping CRT's was actually a TV that I had bought for my mom new... after only about 10 or 15 years, we had noticed the plastic on the base starting to crack under the TV's own weight, and eventually she moved and needed help and when I picked the thing up, the whole thing literally just fell apart. I ended up calling a junk company to take it away, and as they did I guess they couldn't get the right grip on it with all the disintegrated plastic, they jostled it in just the wrong way and the screen imploded. Luckily these things are designed in such a way that they're supposed to "contain" an implosion like that, but it was startling both for them and for me, my wife and mother standing about 10 feet away. The entire screen shattered (but stayed in place) as the junk guys were carrying it, with a big "boom!" They ended up dropping it, as you could understand.

The problem is really how brittle the plastic has gotten on many CRT's, and the fact that most of any CRT is just air. The plastic case is very easy to press in because there's nothing there behind it to provide support, and when you do that to this kind of old plastic, it just snaps. So shipping one is really rolling the dice at best.

Even with the crazy amount of packing on that final attempt, the fact that the boxes were so damaged just shows how close you came to losing another one.

btw my 5153 has the same picture issues as yours. These are CRT's from 1983... they're not the best that CRT technology had to offer.

VileR wrote on 2021-04-14, 23:39:

Wrote this blog post as a public service, after finally receiving a CRT (IBM 5153) that wasn't all smashed to bits by incompetence along the way:
https://int10h.org/blog/2021/04/safe-crt-moni … -5153-makes-it/

It goes into the details on the packing, boxing and shipping, for the one that made it as well as the two that didn't. So if anyone's planning to ship a CRT, maybe some of this can help.

Awesome story and information.

As a past receiver of a thoroughly smashed-in CRT, I understand. In my case, the monitor's metal frame was actually deformed (plus the attendant, obvious fatal internal damage that goes with such an impact). Clearly, it had either borne a weight of several hundred kilograms, or been dropped from minimum 2 metres on to concrete. Something of that magnitude. Far from the only time I've seen the results of such handling.

From time-to-time I also ship (non-computer-related) ~$1000 artworks around the world, and as such I have learned some very harsh lessons over the years. Namely, that the degree of packaging overcompensation required is Ridiculous, to even be in the ballpark of safe arrival assurance.

After a few such lessons, I took to constructing reinforced plywood crates, heavily glued and screwed (only open-able at the top side), as a shipping exoskeleton for things I really care about. At a cost of a couple of hours, and about $40 in materials. That has yet to fail me, and if it does, it'll be hard for them to deny a compensation claim using the reason of inadequate protection!

And what actually drove the making of wooden boxes, was the simple fact that (with cardboard boxes) the HUGE amount of padding and boxing we began to require, drove the Volumetric shipping charges through the roof. To the point where it cost us less to ship a heavier smaller crate, rather than a huge bulky but-lighter-weight one!

Ha - the idea of building a wooden box did cross my mind... if I had to ship something extra sensitive like that myself, I'd consider it.

The most impressive-sounding advice I've heard was this (courtesy of Hugo Holden on VCF):

During wartime, CRT's (the actual bare tubes) were placed in a canvas bag with 8 springs attached to it. The springs were connected to the inside corners of a wooden crate. The springs also had a plastic coating over them(a tube) for resonance damping. When the crate got dropped and hit the ground, the CRT could move more slowly and the energy get dissipated by the damping.

I've also heard it said that it's safer to remove the yoke as well, since that's the part that can break and take the tube down with it.

I guess I'm also lucky in that this is a relatively small monitor. If it was a 19-incher or so, two boxes *and* decent padding would've been less feasible...

What a pity to smash these rare CRTs in transport. This should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who sells or buys CRTs.