The container door swung open and the smell hit first.
Diesel. Damp wood. Something sour underneath. Forty-one days at sea, and the wooden crate inside was streaked white with salt. We pried the lid off with a crowbar and there it was — a brand-new genset, dead as a brick. The starter wouldn’t even click. Green fuzz had grown over the battery terminals, and the control panel connectors looked like they’d been dipped in the ocean. The ocean hadn’t touched it. It hadn’t needed to.
That was a long time ago, and it was our fault, not the sea’s. The machine had passed its load bank test at the factory with flying colors. Then we nailed it into a crate, handed it to a forwarder, and forgot one thing: a steel box crossing the equator is a greenhouse full of salt. Everything inside sweats, rusts, or shifts.
I’ve shipped dozens of sets since. Most arrive fine now, because we learned the hard way what actually matters. It isn’t complicated. It’s a crate, some bags of desiccant, a few bolts, and the discipline to check everything twice before the door closes.
Some buyers ask to ship the set on an open skid — no crate — to save money. Don’t. An export crate costs a few percent of what the machine does, and it buys you protection against the two things that actually destroy gensets at sea: water getting in and the machine moving around. An open skid has neither. I’ve seen open-skid sets arrive with rain pooled in the alternator. The alternator does not forgive that. (A steel container around the set helps for the same reason — enclosure is strategy, not packaging.)
One more thing about the wood itself. Most countries follow ISPM 15, which means wooden packaging has to be heat-treated and stamped with the IPPC mark. Untreated pallets and crates can be refused, fumigated at your expense, or destroyed at the destination port. Ask your crate supplier for the stamp. If they look confused, find another supplier.
This is the part people don’t believe until they see it. A sealed container at sea is not dry. The sun bakes the box all day, the temperature drops at night, and moisture condenses on the steel roof — then rains back down on your cargo. They call it container rain, and it’s real. I’ve opened crates where the desiccant bags were doing their job and everything was fine, and crates where somebody skipped them and the steel looked a decade older after six weeks.
The fix is boring. Wrap the machine in vapor-barrier film and seal it to the skid — a torn corner is as bad as no wrap at all, so tape it properly and check it after every move. Hang desiccant inside the wrap: the rule of thumb I’ve used for years is a kilo or two of silica gel per cubic meter of enclosed volume, more if the destination is the tropics. Lay VCI paper over exposed steel and terminals — it releases a corrosion inhibitor that settles on the metal. And coat every unpainted surface you can reach with rust-preventive oil. Grease is ugly. Grease wipes off. Rust doesn’t.
On one of our early shipments the wrap tore at a bottom corner when a forklift nudged the skid, and nobody noticed. Six weeks later I opened the crate to find the battery terminals green and fuzzy and the controller connectors filmed over with corrosion. We lost a full day cleaning and re-terminating before it would crank. A twenty-cent piece of tape, and a habit of checking the wrap after every move. That’s the whole lesson.
A two-ton machine in a wooden box becomes a projectile when the ship rolls in heavy weather. I don’t care how good your crate is — if the set can move inside it, something will break. Through-bolt the base frame to the skid, not with wood screws that pull out, but with bolts that go all the way through. Chock the frame so it can’t slide. And mark the lifting points and the center of gravity with paint on the outside of the crate, big and obvious.
I’ve seen daylight through a radiator core. The dock crew at the destination port guessed where to put the forks, missed the pockets by half a meter, and drove both tines straight through the radiator. The crate had lifting diagrams — inside, where nobody could see them. Paint them on the outside. Assume the person handling your machine has never seen a generator before. Often, they haven’t.
Here’s the thing most first-time exporters get wrong: you can’t just fill the tank and ship it. Freight forwarders treat diesel as dangerous goods, and a full tank means hazmat paperwork, surcharges, and long conversations at customs. We ship with the tank drained or near-empty — the buyer fuels it on arrival. The engine doesn’t care. The shipping company does.
Disconnect the battery cables and tie them back, negative terminal isolated. Batteries self-discharge over a forty-day voyage, so tell the buyer — in writing, on the crate, in the manual pouch — to charge the battery before the first crank. Half the “dead on arrival” reports I’ve investigated were just a flat battery. The machine was fine. Nobody told anyone to charge it.
Two more small ones. Coolant: make sure the antifreeze concentration matches the destination climate, not the factory’s. And before the lid goes on, photograph everything — the tie-downs, the desiccant, the disconnected terminals, the crate stamps. If something arrives damaged, your insurance claim lives or dies on those photos. I learned that one the expensive way, too.
I keep a short list taped inside every crate we ship, and I make the crew read it out loud before the lid goes on. Wood stamped and fumigation-proof. Wrap sealed, desiccant hung. Bolts through the frame, lifting points painted. Battery disconnected, tank drained, photos taken. Five lines. Takes two minutes. The sets that get this treatment arrive alive — every time.
The set from that first shipment? It lived, eventually. We cleaned the terminals, dried the controller, charged the battery, and it cranked on the third try. It ran fine for years. But I never forgot the smell when that container door opened — and I never ship a generator the old way again. If you’re speccing a set for export, talk to us before the forwarder quotes. The crating decisions are cheaper at the factory than at the port.
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