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screen printing => Equipment => Topic started by: ZooCity on October 17, 2014, 03:04:25 PM
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I saw that Gerry recently went through this. What's everyone's experience, can you ever get repaid for damage done during a truckload or LTL shipment?
Our Sportsman arrived today, (a '13 we purchased used) and the pallet with the print heads has severe damage. The front heads of a few print heads are shattered. It looks like someone forked it with short forks even though "6' forks minimum" is spray painted in blaze orange all over the sides.
Estes allows accepting the delivery and notating a damaged pallet for claims which is what we're doing now. Dismantling the damaged crate, no way was I going to try and move it again, and documenting.
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I'm sure you did, but get pictures. Have the driver sin off on the damage
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Did you purchase insurance? My claim was with them. The trucking companies are not liable for anything. The law is they are directly responsible for, if I remember correctly 10 cents a pound. So please tell me you purchased insurance.
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I was just thinking about this today. We are about to purchase another press and I'm making sure that we get insurance and everything before the guy we're buying it from ships it out. Can't risk losing the money.
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bill of lading..
at the first sign of damage refuse the shipment, get in touch with who sent it and then the trucking company.
It's a binding contract that as soon as you sign it, you release them of damages.
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You can go back on the trucking company. You'll have to file a cargo claim with them. Most likely it's their fault anyway. They unloaded it somewhere to consolidate the shipments and damaged it would be my guess. Or it wasn't secured properly in the trailer and the guy went off roading.
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This is my nightmare and why I always transport stuff myself. I know eventually I will have to have something crated and shipped, but after seeing the condition the pallets regularly arrived in at my old job it's terrifying. We used probably a dozen different carriers over the 5 years I worked there, shipping 2 pallets of equipment about 50 times a year, and I would say a good 25% of the time it had some kind of damage and a handful of times had been completely broken apart and shittily put back together, with something important broken or missing almost every time that happened. Filing claims is worthless and they max out at like $5k in liability typically and will fight you for years on paying even that. We had our own rider on our insurance policy just for traveling equipment as a result.
Everything was packed in pelican cases, then stacked, wrapped and reinforced with an exterior frame. I don't even know how you crush a pelican case inside a pallet like that, but it happened...
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i used craters and freighters...holy crap it was expensive, but honestly, they had their crap together and did a great job. i have never seen crating like this.
they did all the work from picking it up, crating, shipping, and delivery to the back door.
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The $5k in liability you referenced is for new freight, other than new freight it is ten cents per pound
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I thought I was doing everything right on this...may be totally screwed in the end.
I hired GSG to do the inspection of the equipment, teardown and palletizing. It looks like they did that correctly from what we could see. However, the bill for this was north of $2600 because the carrier, Estes, kept refusing the shipment and not being very specific with what they wanted added to the pallets. It added over a day of tech time at over $100/hr. I guess they wanted 3/4" sheeting all around even though it was a palletized shipment, not crated. The GSG tech really made it clear where to put the forks and spray painted, in blaze orange, "minimum 6 foot forks". His packing looked fine to me.
One of my guys here is like a freight forensics expert or something and deduced what happened pretty well. Looks like it was forked with short forks and it just ripped all the studs out that the print heads were clamped to. Probably happened in the air, though we're not sure on that.
I added insurance. I called my rep at freightquote today and he says he's not sure he added the insurance when I said to do so....
He also booked it as used equipment which is true, but all of the equip is 2013.
Estes policy is that you can accept a whole shipment and fail claim on one pallet. I had them email me this to have in writing. I packed as much information on the damage, in 8pt type, into the description box on the BR as a I could and signed it.
We had to uncrate this on the truck, no way to move it without further damage. We have about 5000 photos of it.
We need to purchase a minimum 6, possibly 8 complete print head assys. Getting cost on that from M&R presently.
Gerry, did the insurance take care of you 100%? Not sure why I'm asking though since it appears my rep never put the insurance on.
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Did they charge you or quote you for the insurance? Is there any record anywhere of you requesting it?
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Hopefully there is record of some sort like an email or something of your request for insurance although I am not sure if that would really help or not. The insurance company did make me whole after a deductible and freight costs, so sort of. I ended up keeping the press and selling which ended up with us making a small profit but it wasn't worth all the headache. you will have to negotiate that as well because if they pay out, the damaged equipment is theirs. So you have to negotiate whether you want to keep it or not.
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If you have the driver sign the BOL when it shows up stating that it is damaged it can help your case. They will probably end up sending a claims adjuster out who will look it over and try to figure out what is damaged/ owed. Once the claim is received from them the freight company will drag their feet on payment, and low ball you on the amount. Sorry to hear about this, that is a tough spot to be in; especially without that insurance.
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Did they charge you or quote you for the insurance? Is there any record anywhere of you requesting it?
Phone call.
Complete print head assys for this press are $4618/per +crate/ship. We could be out 30 grand to replace 6 heads, about 7k shy of what we paid for the whole press.
I need to get my rep to stick to his word on the insurance somehow. If he didn't put it on there then I have no idea if anything could be done. We have yet to receive invoicing for the shipment.
That's best case. Worst case is we're given $500 back while 30 grand was taken from our pocket.
Driver was very helpful and did sign the BOL stating all the damage.
Had to reschedule our M&R tech who was coming Monday morning too....not the best day I've had in a while.
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That really sucks and I really hope you come up with something that helps you out and they don't stick you.
Freight is a rough deal. We just got our 6 head in yesterday with the pallet slightly destroyed on the corner and I had a sinking feeling right away. But no damage thankfully.
Best wishes.
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It is why I am now very skeptical of buying used equipment now. Even new you dont have any guarantees on the freight, man I hope this works out for you.
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Over that much damage you might need to get a lawyer involved. Or at least talk to one to see what your options are. Lawyers usually speed things up. The trucking company has cargo insurance probably with a $5000 deductible on their part. I don't know much of the 10 cent per pound deal, that's pretty stupid.
I hope things work out for you. Man that sucks.
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This is pretty standard fine print you will find on BOL's
Carrier liability with shipment originating within the United States: Unless the Shipper declares excess value on the Bill of Lading below, requests excess liability coverage and pays an
additional charge, Carrier’s maximum liability is $25.00 per pound per individual lost or damaged piece within the shipment, subject to $150,000.00 maximum total liability per shipment, and provided
further that Carrier’s liability on articles other than new articles, including but not limited to used, remanufactured or refurbished articles, shall not exceed ten cents ($.10) per pound per individual
lost or damaged piece within the shipment. And, provided further, that Carrier’s liability on household goods and personal effects shall not exceed ten cents ($.10) per pound per individual lost or
damaged piece within the shipment. For this purpose the declared value of the property is hereby specifically stated by the Shipper to be $ , and Shipper agrees to pay an additional
charge for excess liability coverage. Total declared value may not exceed $650,000.00 per shipment.
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Really sorry to hear about this. As someone about to have a brand new press shipped to my shop, it also makes me a bit nervous.
What is the best course of action to take to ensure that the cost of the equipment is covered, even under the worst of circumstances?
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It is why I am now very skeptical of buying used equipment now. Even new you dont have any guarantees on the freight, man I hope this works out for you.
I agree with this. Buying new you have a different leverage... if a M&R press was to come in destroyed they ship a BUNCH of stuff with companies like that, they could easily threaten to stop using them as leverage to get reimbursed. I would also go out on a limb and say most reputable manufactures would make it right either way on a new machine damaged in shipping.
Used your often dealing with either a seller who is selling because they are closing (broke) or downsizing or a broker who hasn't even seen it and has no money in the profit to make it right. There are exceptions of course.
When we buy used, we buy it and pick it up ourselves and transport it ourselves.
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The trucking company has cargo insurance probably with a $5000 deductible on their part.
That number can vary widely.......Some cargo companies "self insure" and carry this risk on their own.....Sometimes they ""re-insure" over a much higher limit....So numerous small claims are handled in-house and only after a certain amount (individually or cumulatively) do they actually go to an insurer...
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It is why I am now very skeptical of buying used equipment now. Even new you dont have any guarantees on the freight, man I hope this works out for you.
I agree with this. Buying new you have a different leverage... if a M&R press was to come in destroyed they ship a BUNCH of stuff with companies like that, they could easily threaten to stop using them as leverage to get reimbursed. I would also go out on a limb and say most reputable manufactures would make it right either way on a new machine damaged in shipping.
Used your often dealing with either a seller who is selling because they are closing (broke) or downsizing or a broker who hasn't even seen it and has no money in the profit to make it right. There are exceptions of course.
When we buy used, we buy it and pick it up ourselves and transport it ourselves.
we purchase a Ryder on our policy to protect our customers. That way if the carrier denies coverage we turn it over to our insurance company. Insurance company against insurance company ends up a win for the customer. Part of why you buy from companies like M&R.
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It is why I am now very skeptical of buying used equipment now. Even new you dont have any guarantees on the freight, man I hope this works out for you.
I agree with this. Buying new you have a different leverage... if a M&R press was to come in destroyed they ship a BUNCH of stuff with companies like that, they could easily threaten to stop using them as leverage to get reimbursed. I would also go out on a limb and say most reputable manufactures would make it right either way on a new machine damaged in shipping.
Used your often dealing with either a seller who is selling because they are closing (broke) or downsizing or a broker who hasn't even seen it and has no money in the profit to make it right. There are exceptions of course.
When we buy used, we buy it and pick it up ourselves and transport it ourselves.
we purchase a Ryder on our policy to protect our customers. That way if the carrier denies coverage we turn it over to our insurance company. Insurance company against insurance company ends up a win for the customer. Part of why you buy from companies like M&R.
I agree, when making a large purchase like an Auto, unless its just small money where you can afford the risk... it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me without being ULTRA careful and having seen a few deals now and the way these brokers work (not all), boy is it a crap shoot and most people do not cover their bases all the way!
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I'd still be throwing up....good luck zoo.
I have a new compressor coming and now I'm all nervous
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Freightquote has been pretty good on claim payout in our case. Few ink and chemicals claims were paid fast. However we did have a full truck shipment that got double brokered and damaged a few print heads. Their claims dept. did help us go after the carriers insurance company and eventually got paid. It took 11 months though, but certainly better that the $.10 a pound they originally offered. Send before and after photos to your rep. there and keep on him and their claims department.
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Sqslabs, to answer your question:
- I agree with Brandt and others, transport yourself if possible.
- When not possible to drive it yourself do a full truckload. It's the next best thing and there is no transferring of the load which is where the damage seems to always happen.
- Insure the living hell of out everything from every angle you can.
I too am beginning to question buying used at all. This press is (was) near new, a 2013 with low impressions. It likely should have been classed as new equip. Anyways, my point is that I did everything right or so it seemed: used a broker to set it all up on the freight and professionals to do the inspection, teardown and crating. I can't believe I spent 2600 on getting the machinery on the truck just to have them do this to it. It really does seem like it's not worth it at some point.
Rich, you mentioned putting a rider in your co. insurance. I'm now wondering if our co.'s insurance wouldn't cover this, it's very comprehensive. Thanks for the idea, it's an incredibly sharp move to pit the two insurance co.'s against each other. I imagine the resolutions are much faster as well.
Here are some pics of the carnage.
I'm going to inspect each head more closely today. It may not be a total loss of these heads if the linear travel of the carriage hasn't been distorted. If the linear travel was true on the head it would just be a matter of replacing screen holders and all the other components. Expensive and wrong that we would incur that cost but still cheaper than replacing with brand new, complete head assys. However, the AC heads and controllers took some serious hits and that could be a deal killer for trying to repair heads.
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Wow looks pretty rough. Did the truck driver say much about it?
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wow...what the freak were they even thinking...
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Driver said he's never seen anything like that and would have rejected the whole thing. It's fairly obvious it happened at the last transfer in SLC. That's the last time it was loaded.
I have no idea how someone just does that and sends the trailer off.
Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk
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Ya you would think that they would just unload it and call you/the shipper. At least that would be the honest thing to do.
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Insurance is cheap, cover the crap out of everything. There are riders available to cover just about anything. Having a good insurance broker is necessary to make sure you have the coverage you need when you need it, one of the best moves we made as a business. We even go as far as getting riders to cover large jobs. Like Rich said let the insurance companies hash it out over a claim just get your check. If the machine is leased or financed the note holder has interest in getting the matter resolved and maybe an asset.
Document everything in a dedicated notebook. Include dates, where, what, when, part numbers, hours spent, etc so when it does come to settle noting if forgotten about.
If it turns out you do have to change out six heads the cheaper route maybe to purchase a used six color press and use it as parts. The print heads are pretty stout and doubt they are damaged to the point of unusable. Like you said it may just be a matter of replacing screen holders, micros, etc which may not be that bad.
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Day 14 and we are still missing 2 pallets containing all our platens, tooling, tri lock and CTS. Neither our rep nor the sales manageer at freightquote.com will respond today after saying they would arrive yesterday.
As an update I would like to extend my middle finger to the two guys assigned to our account at freightquote.com. Unbelievable the way we are being treated. Since notifying them of the damage and missing pallets it's clear they have zero interest in helping find our still missing property. I had to call the cust service line this morning and get random employee to help me track it, which took all of 15 minutes whereas they were saying the pallets were MIA for days or simply not responding. We did fine with freightquote for many years but the moment something went awry, this is how they behave. To top it off the sales manager that this was "sent up to" is a childish d bag. Ugh. It may be that freightquote would not be happy with this sort of behavior so I should probably escalate it and check with another manager to be fair to them before publicly damning them forever.
Lessons learned?
- Get it all in writing. I knew this one, we all know this one, but sometimes it tricky. I couldn't book this online as usual due to the oversized pallets and it was done entirely over the phone. The BOL was the only confirmation of anything that we received. I should have had it all in email. Never trust a sales person, eh? The manager I spoke with said "there's no written proof anywhere of the instruction to add insurance, therefore it is not something we are responsible for" I countered " by that logic, nor is there record of the amount we owe you for this shipment, therefore it is not something we are responsible for". We still have no invoice or detailed quote from the shipping fees. Even when it's someone you've worked with before, make them email it to you. Anyone who refuses to is probably lying to you and plans to back out of any agreements should they be called upon to fulfill them.
- Increase your off premises property limit on your co. insurance. Our insurer, Farmer's, has the claim moving forward and so far it's been smooth and they have been very responsive. Sad thing is that we only had $5k on the off premises property, probably just to cover in town deliveries and such. Had I raised the limit prior to shipping we could have received all our money back. Thanks to Rich Hoffman for bringing this up in this thread. I believe this may be the most foolproof way to protect your inbound freight.
- Use smaller pallets. Ones that can be moved with 4' forks wherever possible. It was the oversized pallet getting forked with short forks that wrecked our shizzle. If machinery can be broke down to fit on smaller pallets, do it. If it can't be, consider shipping truckload v. LTL
We also have a lawyer working on our case. I'm not expecting much to come of that but they seem to think there is an avenue. Their take on it was essentially that "somebody, somewhere along this shipment, has insurance covering this and we can go after it". Luckily, it looks like we can get our own insurance coverage paid out, move forward with repairs and getting the machine running and see if anything pans out from legal action to recover the costs that insurance did not.
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Yeah, freight quote screwed us before too. Never again will I use them. They "attempted" to correct their wrong doing, but it was a bunch of bull. I just go straight to the shipping companies myself and get quotes.
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That's a shame. They really made it clear to us they don't give a rip about what happened, where the missing pallets were, etc.
One thing I forgot to add to that list of lessons learned and I guess it's obvious- always have redundancy or, should you be so lucky, time available when getting into new equipment. We're ok right now as we have all we need to run still in place. Losing revenue certainly without the second press and other items but staying more or less on track. Without that redundancy this would be catastrophic for us.
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So in the end our insurance adjustor actually worked to get this covered under another portion of our policy. It nearly paid the repair bill to fix 6 of the heads from M&R. I thought an insurance adjustor's sole job was to pay out less, so I was shickled titless that our guy helped us out so much.
We still lost all the production time, the whole point of buying a nearly new machine used (i.e., immediate shipment) is now moot and my tally sheet has over 3 grand in staff time spent just dealing with this.
My take on shipping and damage is, primarily, that all these people are assholes. They will destroy your gear and they will lie and point fingers at anyone they can to squirm out of it. Best to avoid even trying to get them to make good on their responsibilities.
Moving forward I'm taking Rich/244's approach: have a good insurer, have off premises property coverage that meets or exceeds anything you might ship in a term and let the insurer handle it if at all possible. They will pay you out according to coverage and then subrogate against either the carrier, broker or both to recoup. We did explore legal action on our own, just spent a couple grand on it for peace of mind and yes, we had a strong enough case for a settlement and would have received one but I doubt it would have been as much as our insurance already paid. You cannot collect twice, i.e., the insurer gets first dibs on the settlement up to the amount their policy covered and we didn't think it was worth wrestling a high dollar amount out of either company so we dropped it.
Ironically, our Starlight came in last month with the glass shattered to all hell. I think we just are hexed when it comes to LTL.
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Wow. So sorry you have been going through this. As a new shop that will be buying a lot of new equipment soon I am taking notes!
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Wow. So sorry you have been going through this. As a new shop that will be buying a lot of new equipment soon I am taking notes!
I hope some of this helps!
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Man that's a real bummer, but nice to hear you recouped some of it. I just shipped a dryer up the east coast and by the time they received it the dryer had jumped out if its feet, cracked a 2x4 on the side wall of the crate, smashed one of the door handles and bent up some metal pretty bad. I'm sure it'll still run fine, but I wonder how any of these shipping companies can stay in business throwing things around like that.
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Methinks you've got a rowdy forklift op at your local distro center Chris.
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Yeah, that seems to be the case but we think it might be happening in SLC. The press heads were loaded to a container there so our local guys didn't even see the whole situation until we got the first crate out, they had tucked the damaged one behind it and it was impossible to see the extent of the damage.
These companies stay in business because they really are a chain of brokers, carriers and subs. So some a-hole at a transfer ignores markings on a crate, destroys it and shoves it into a wedge but it's going to be tough and maybe not worth it for the carrier to bother tracking that down. The Carmack Amendment protects the carriers from culpability for most damages and that along with terms protect the broker, although not in our case. Our insurer will easily get a settlement from either or both parties.
What I don't get is why the rule isn't to stop and hold the cargo if damaged, why are these people just passing it down the line? I couldn't imagine working like that.
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We have been lucky. Knock on wood.
But we do not use brokers. We deal direct with a carrier that serves our area. Seems to remove a variable.
Incoming garments tend to get more "who is cheapest" action, and an occasional pallet issue occurs, but then, it's not our issue. Whee!!
Incoming garments on fedex or ups freight have been perfect.
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i bought a piece of equipment and I couldn't crate it, so I sent a service in to do it. They handled crating, shipping and delivery. It was pricey, but it was ALL on them. I did buy insurance as well.
This was the most amazingly crated piece of equipment I had ever seen. You could have damn near flipped it over a few times and it still would have been fine.
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Yeah, I deal direct with freight companies now. No more freightquote.com or anybody like that.
Our gauntlet II just came in and two of the three pallets had slightly collapsed on one side, but I had insurance so I was not too worried about it. Luckily, nothing was wrong with the equipment (that we've noticed so far!)