Tips on crating a motorcycle
 

Hi

Anyone tell me what the ins and outs are to crate a motorcycle for shipping by sea or air especially assuming you are in some far off place and need to make up your own crate somehow.

Thanks

Dear Gmarch!!

On our trip we crated our bikes 3 (yes, three!!) times. What we discovered is, that wherever you want to ship your bike from, there will be someone who can build the crate for/ with you.
In Indonesia we got beautifully hand-crafted boxes made from some kind of mahagony wood, really too bad we had to leave the things behind in Singapore. I think it's going to be a lot easier if you use the help of the shipping company to build the crate. They'll have the right people, tools and materials. And if you'r not shipping out of Japan or western Europe it won't cost you an arm and a leg.
We left both wheels on the bikes and strapped them down to the (rigid!!) base grid. But you'll save some volume (=money) if you take the front wheel off, even much more if you take the bike apart even more. In Mongolia we met some Guys who had flown their BMs from Austria. They had taken both wheels and the fork off, total volume of the crate less than two qms.

Hope that's good for a start, please feel free to ask lots of questions.

Greetings, Patrick www.transasia.at


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I can send you a photo of a simple wooden pallet that I used as a base when I shipped my motorcycle by air from Canada to Europe this summer. It would not cost more than about US$ 20 to build such a pallet from dimensional lumber.

Generally, you don't have to 'crate' the motorcycle per se if you are shipping it by air. It just has to be affixed (by straps, tie-downs) to a pallet that can then be handled by a forklift. The airlines will put the motorcycle and pallet combination inside of an aluminum cargo container which they supply.

Regards, Michael

About those photos of the pallet and crate - if you go to the link below, then scroll to the very bottom of the page, you will see 5 links that lead to pictures of my motorcycle on the pallet, the pallet itself, and the LD6 aircraft container.
http://www.micapeak.com/~marcl/pages/shipbike.html