Designing Crates for Cost Effective Shipping

An overlooked aspect of the prefab shelter business is the packaging and crating of the material. Many customers might not think much about how their shelter is packaged and crated, but we do here at Austin Mohawk. Smaller shelters can be shipped in crates with LTL carriers on box trucks, but that is not always possible for bigger shelters. Some bigger shelters, especially those with fully assembled hip roofs, require a flatbed trailer to get them from our facility to the job site.

Even when using a dedicated flatbed to haul a shelter, there are still limitations that must be considered:

• Legal maximum width allowed-without any special permits is 8’6”.
  
  
• Anything beyond 8’6” will require a permit for each state the truck travels through.
  
  
• Various rules limiting the hours that the truck is allowed to drive.
  
  
• In some cases, the “over-wide” dimension is unavoidable and the permits and special rules are required to get the material delivered. 

However, in other cases, some creative crating techniques can bring an “over-wide” product under the legal limit and allow for faster, more cost-effective shipping. 

An example of this is Austin Mohawk’s standard 10x10 Hip-Roof Smokers Shelter. At 10’ wide, the hip roof is well beyond the 8’6” limit. By building a crate to tip the roof up at an angle, we can achieve the 8’6” width, while also packaging all of the shelter components in one tidy crate that can be shipped on any typical flatbed trailer, without any restrictions.