Oversized Cargo, Crating And The Lift Plan: The Six Items To Have Ready Before A Crane Is Booked

An oversized load is scheduled around the day it is crated, not the day the factory says it will be finished. This page sets out the six answers, the four signatures we cannot issue, and the questions a lift plan has to settle.

This is a procedure walkthrough. No consignment, project or buyer is named, and no on-time or damage result is claimed for any load.

What the desk should already hold

Before a frame or a flat rack is reserved, whoever takes the booking should be able to give, without reaching for a file: the outside measurements, the mass, how the load will be lifted and by what, where the timber frame is built, whether the lane demands marked wooden packing, and who will be named as importer of record. One of those still blank and the reservation is only a placeholder.

Where the frame is built is a decision, not a default

Timber framing can be built by the producing factory or built here. Both routes are normal, and they are handled as different jobs, because a crate that arrives with the cargo carries its own history — the timber it used, whether it was treated, and whether the mark on it can be traced to the facility that applied it. Where a lane is subject to ISPM-15, we state plainly that the heat treatment and the ISPM-15 mark are issued by the licensed treatment facility, not by us.

The lift plan is a set of questions about buildings, not trucks

Where the load leaves the vehicle at the destination, what the dock or ground can carry, the fork length and capacity available on both ends, the height of the doorway the goods pass through on the way out, and whether the centre of gravity moves when the crate is on. A frame that fits the truck and will not fit the receiving bay is the most common expensive discovery in this category, and it is free to check before anything is built.

Four documents whose signatures are not ours

Battery-driven cargo is cleared by documents with several different authors: the UN test summary and the IEC report come from the testing laboratory, the sixteen-section safety data sheet comes from the cell or product supplier, and the timber mark comes from the treatment facility. What is ours is the export entry: we lodge it under the shipper’s written authority. A forwarder who claims to issue any of the first three is describing a stamp they do not hold.

Booking windows, and why a published day count is not the point

Special equipment is finite per sailing, so the reservation is built around the crating date rather than the production date — a load crated early but described late still cannot board, and a load described early but crated late has already paid for the space. Transit on this category is quoted as a range and moves with carrier schedule changes; the number that can be pinned down is the cut-off for the equipment reservation.

When the load is already late

Exception notices are answered within 2 hours, with work toward a resolution inside 24 hours on China business days, and a re-plan on this category usually means a different vessel rather than a faster one.

Written by the operations desk that books and clears these lanes, not by a content team working from brochures.

Read on this site: the six questions to ask before crating; what a wooden packing mark is supposed to signal; how special and project cargo is handled. This page follows the editorial and corrections rules for this site.