I don’t have the next Montana Road Trip photos ready yet, so will post this instead. For those of you who wanna learn something about shipping a spinning wheel, this is the place to be.

A wahine in my Joe Jorgensen Ravelry group wanted to buy a JJ wheel and she found one, right here in Oregon (a friend of mine was selling hers). Only problem…Debbie lives in Georgia, and Kay, my friend, was swamped with extremely important family stuff and didn’t have the time to pack up the wheel and ship it, so I volunteered to help out. 

So one day, I drove down the freeway to Kay’s house; I took a photo of the wheel before I loaded it in my car.

Nice wheel, yeah?  It’s made of out myrtlewood.

Inside my van, we packed everything we could find around it, including Nolemana’s neck pillow for road trips.

Here she is in our dining room, without her Mother of All, (that’s the piece where the bobbin and flyer attach), waiting to have the drive wheel taken off to be separately wrapped. Pay attention to the cone-shaped tops of the upright wheel supports, cuz I’m gonna show you something really neat.

Nolemana was a huge help getting this all done.First, we took apart the wheel. I took photos all the way through so as to help with reassembly.

For instance, talk about ingenuity on Joe’s part:

See the very small hole on the wheel upright?

Well, check this out!

There’s a corresponding hole on the cone that fits over it! (The large hole is for the pin that holds the wheel in place.)

And guess what else?

There are two holes for the cone on the other side, so you can’t get them mixed up. Kay showed me how you can’t interchange them. Genius.

We continued by removing the footman, and I took photos of how it had been tied on.

And here’s the drive wheel, lying on the floor. It looked rather lonesome down there.

After that, we individually wrapped every single part of the wheel: the flyer (double wrapped that one), MOA, (that one too), whorl, bobbins, maidens, etc., and taped them securely.

After all that was done, we did some measuring, then went down to U-Haul to check out boxes, bubble wrap, and packing peanuts. But one of their boxes would really work, so we decided to head up the road to UPS. We found out there that the boxes at U-Haul are moving boxes, and that UPS boxes are shipping boxes, double thickness. ‘Way different.

UPS gave us a price for packing it up, which seemed pretty high to us. So we came back home and talked over what’d be the best way to do this and give me a chance to call Debbie to get her advice.

We talked about building our own box, which Debbie does at work all the time. In the end though, Debbie decided to just let UPS pack it. So we took the wheel back, and left it there for UPS ladies to pack. I went back when they called to pick it up. They’d weighed and measured it, and now I just have to wait for Debbie to send me the shipping label. I made sure they wrapped each leg individually; they didn’t come off the table. It turned out that it was actually cheaper to let UPS pack it up.

We had UPS finish the packing; we had to bring the wheel and box home because there was an emergency in Debbie’s family and she wasn’t ready to have it shipped yet. No biggie.

Good ting I get one van wea da rear seats fold down flat, yeah?

Nolemana brought the box inside and we put it by the front door. Keola thought it was a grand perch.

K’den. Pau for now, but more coming tomorrow.