23skidoo

Here's a few of mine:

1. Got a frame/fork from a fellow member and the packing material included a very nice 100% wool sweater...you know who you are if you want it back.
2. A frame and fork that included a laundry bag with--ewww--about 40 pairs of used jockey shorts and boxers.
3. Got a nice vintage saddle in today's mail wrapped in an old t-shirt, surrounded by greasy shop rags.
4. A box of parts that was packed with wood shavings and small bits from someone's power plane. Very fragrant with lots of cedar.
5. Speaking of fragrant, an NOS Ofmega hubset in a box surrounded by female undergarments that had been doused in some interesting and lingering essential oil; every time I dig through my box of hubsets i get this whiff...
6. Someone's collection of plastic shopping bags--about six bags stuffed to the brim and knotted with tiny knots.

stien

You win...but I've gotten lots of candy before.

Chombi

Small empty plastic soda bottles. Surprisingly, they privide much better shock/damage prtection to heavier objects n boxes within bigger boxes, as they do not pop like the small air bags they currently use for packing.


Chombi

dbakl

Porno mag pages....

PolishGuy

Ditto on the candy. I bought a rear rack for my Raleigh DL-1 from Larry the "Boneman" on the Old Roads site and it was packed with Milky Way bars. Very tasty stuff and a nice rack to boot. PG.

23skidoo

sailorbenjamin

Those of us who restore old boats know that you can't get Honduran mahogany any more. The Honduran government banned export of the stuff as a raw material. The idea was to create jobs by only exporting finished products.
Sooo.
We can't get the correct lumber to redo this antique boat and go with Brazilian mahogany. It's close but it doesn't take an expert to see the difference.
Then we buy a new power planer for the shop and it arrives on a nice new Honduran mahogany palette

beech333

#6 isn't that surprising to me. We save "poop sacks" to pick up after the dog on walks and put them in knots to save space. Everybody donates to our cause so we end up with too many sometimes. I've shipped with them several times and for a few members here. Did I use them on that RD that I returned to you a few months back?

Edit: Nevermind, I see what you were talking about as being "stuffed to the brim" now. The bags were inside of other bags.. That wasn't me.

blaise_f

I got a penny farthing that had all kinds of laundry as packing materials. Socks around the hubs. Bed sheets around the tubes. A couple towels taped to things. It was strange enough.

wrk101

Received a bicycle shipped from Seattle to my home in the Carolinas, in a bike box, with absolutely no packing what-so-ever. I would have loved it had the shipper used dirty laundry, trash, plastic bags, or anything.

3373jones

the poor brazilian rainforest....

Binxsy

A human head with the skull sorta cut off so you could put stuff inside it. But inside it was stuffed with all these ancient looking paper with what I think was latin written on them. Then there was a teak box engraved with all these symbols and inside that was a very nice set of sante shifters....Oddest thing ever...

conspiratemus1

Geez, and I thought the new pair of Adidas running shoes I found in a box with a couple of small parts was weird (although effective, I have to say.) I e-mailed the shipper to ask if he'd made a mistake, meaning to ship the shoes to another buyer? He said, No, he was a rep for Adidas and had a bunch of samples, said to enjoy them if I could, give them away if I couldn't. Funny thing was, they actually fit me. Spooky.

But the dirty laundry, that's just too much!

RobbieTunes

Egg cartons.

cudak888 

Gummi bears.



-Kurt

nickkoto

I've gotten a box full of shredded documents before (cross-cut).

Works like a champ as a packing material, but the person who did that just had to know that it would make a horrendous mess when unpacked.

USAZorro

Just about everything mentioned seems preferable to those horrible, ubiquitous packing peanuts. The electrostatic charges on them ensure they go everywhere except for where you want them to. If I never receive another shipment with those things, it will be too soon.

raverson

While I'm a big fan of Amazon, sometimes I have to wonder...

A while back, I ordered a pair of generic 24" knobbies for a youth sized Nishiki mtb I was fixing up for a friends son. Amazon had the best price, and with the free shipping, they were less than Niagara.

Package arrives as scheduled in a box that could contain at least 10 tires. I open it up to find only one rolled up tire, a mountain of packing paper, and a note saying warehouse 'A' only had one tire in stock and the second tire would be coming from warehouse 'B'.

Next day, the second box arrives, same size as the first, same mountain of packing paper, and the second tire.

I thought to email customer service, but...

Chris_in_Miami

I've had the same experience with Amazon, we bought a set of (6) drinking glasses that got shipped individually, with a similar bundle of packing material for each.

I've never received clothes or shoes used as packing filler. The worst example of packaging was a garment that was stuffed into a brown grocery bag, the bag wadded up into a ball, then wrapped heavily with nearly an entire roll of packing tape. It took a while to open it because I didn't want to damage the contents with scissors.

I received a package from Japan that was loaded with crumpled newspaper, they were very entertaining and mildly pornographic...

23skidoo

Heh. When Joe Bell ships a finished frame back to the owner the packing material is balled up sheets of old newspapers; he must have a deal with a recycling company or a newspaper distributor.