Yeah. I had one seller ship bare cards in busted up polystyrene and screwed up newspaper. 😒

Anti-static foam and anti-static bags are expensive. If there's a good source for them, I'd like to hear about it.

If your are going to wrap loads of memory modules and dont want to spend unnecessary money on anti-static bags then use normal tape and tape the modules tightly together in stacks of 5 or 6. Use a single large anti-static bag, if necessary cut it open to make it even larger then wrap the stacks in it so the stacks dont touch each other, then tape it all tightly together so nothing can move.

Then go ahead and use as much newspaper as you want as protection as long as the memory modules are safe in their anti static package.

Thats how I do it 😀

Eh, maybe I'm just jaded, but I take a more pragmatic view of such things. As long as I feel I've gotten my money's worth on something, I see no point in stressing about it. After receiving enough crap in Ziploc bags and bare bubble mailers, I wouldn't even give a second thought to getting something in shredded newspaper. At least paper is a fairly poor conductor.

You're always taking a chance on used stuff from eBay anyhow, since you can never know the history of the item... perfect packing doesn't really mean much if the thing was kicked around on the carpet before it was boxed up.

Skyscraper wrote:

If your are going to wrap loads of memory modules and dont want to spend unnecessary money on anti-static bags then use normal tape and tape the modules tightly together in stacks of 5 or 6. Use a single large anti-static bag, if necessary cut it open to make it even larger then wrap the stacks in it so the stacks dont touch each other, then tape it all tightly together so nothing can move.

Tape!? The most idiotic instance of shipping I ever dealt with was a CD wrapped in newspaper to which the CD was scotch-taped. Attempting to remove the tape from the CD lifted the aluminum layer clean off. >_< Granted, something like that is much less likely to happen with any kind of PCB, but I'll not be trusting tape for something like that anytime soon.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Eh, maybe I'm just jaded, but I take a more pragmatic view of such things. As long as I feel I've gotten my money's worth on something, I see no point in stressing about it. After receiving enough crap in Ziploc bags and bare bubble mailers, I wouldn't even give a second thought to getting something in shredded newspaper. At least paper is a fairly poor conductor.

You're always taking a chance on used stuff from eBay anyhow, since you can never know the history of the item... perfect packing doesn't really mean much if the thing was kicked around on the carpet before it was boxed up.

I can see no signs showing that these modules ever have been mishandled

No signs at all...

Jorpho wrote:

Tape!? The most idiotic instance of shipping I ever dealt with was a CD wrapped in newspaper to which the CD was scotch-taped. Attempting to remove the tape from the CD lifted the aluminum layer clean off. >_< Granted, something like that is much less likely to happen with any kind of PCB, but I'll not be trusting tape for something like that anytime soon.

I never had any problems with removing tape from memory modules, you dont have to use much of it though. And this is only if you need to package lots of modules and dont have the necessary amount of anti-static bags.

With most recent hardware purchases the items I recieved were tightly wrapped in plastic wrap... probably the worst choice imaginable in regard to static build-up. I've yet to see if anything got damaged that way. But I guess there is not much that can be done for items that yield virtually no profit...

The worst that I had was some solar cells that were packed in cotton and one or two things that were rolled up in toilet paper 😠 In the end I got some of my money back.