José looks pretty happy here, but he does not know his near future...
The container was in fairly bad shape, all beaten up and not well marked. Our supplier in China (Delfu) managed to cram 32 pallets of bearings inside, just below are some problems that our team encountered in unloading it.
First problem, they had trouble with the very durable security seal, the fact that the seal was intact meant that Peruvian Customs did not give it a physical inspection. In the end, they had to get a special tool to cut it open...
Looks OK so far (Roberto in foreground, Erick lower right)...:
Second problem, weak/busted Chinese pallets...
Third problem, the ceiling/roof of the container was dented downwards, this meant that pallets stacked two-high got stuck! You can see how the top pallet got wedged into the dented ceiling. The dented part was across the whole container near the doors.
José working on freeing the stuck pallet with a crowbar. Note that he is up there on the prongs of the forklift, careful up there José! Lily captioned this first below photo "José en plena maniobra!!", as he works on the stuck pallet (next two photos)...
More problems, here all four pallets wedged in and stuck... How did Delfu gets these loaded? Pictured are Erick, José and Nestor.
Here you can see what a 40' container looks like from inside. We had not anticipated that the the straps we had would not be long enough for the forklift to pull the pallets furthest from the doors.
But, they did finish..., some of the 32 pallets stacked in our parking area and patio...
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Our "Chief of Sales to the Provinces" Mercy took some pictures as well. We now have a few pieces with special coding (Pop Quiz: Why would we do that?), the below is a flange (housing without a bearing) for Daewoo Matiz (our coding ATP-BD02, you can see the label with our coding):
This next photo is our best selling Chinese piece, the "E90A" for Nissan Tiida (a car not seen in the USA):
It is our 12th best seller from 2011 - 2013. We have 600 of them now. They will be all gone in two - three months. Note that we sold 400 earlier this year, almost all of them within one month.
| Codigo | Qty | Sales | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50-E90A/40202 | 914 | $36,881.79 | 14 | 500 | 400 |
The below piece (for Nissan Navara 4 x 4) is made by very few companies. But, we have it! Note that it has a Anti-Lock Brake (ALB) sensor, one reason why this piece is relatively expensive.
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The Chinese bearings are now on sale, and flying like hotcakes!
Ah, the real world where crowbars and ingenuity and muscle are still required...
ReplyDeleteGood one! It is necessary to bring the bearings safe to avoid any damage on the way. And this is really safe one. Sintered bearings are best sintered spare parts for long life of any machinery.
ReplyDelete