Shipping a sound card

January 4, 2009 9:27 PM

How do I ship a PCI soundcard without damage?

I'm planning on selling some recording equipment, one being a PCI sound card from inside my computer. I'm pretty sure when internal computer components are sold, they are packaged in a static proof sheath. Where the heck do I get one of these, or is there another way I can safely package it?

posted by truth1ness to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

You can get anti-static bags from pretty much any small computer shop, possibly even free for the asking. If you're lucky, they'd even have a box that would fit the soundcard (possibly from a soundcard). Just that, or once you have the anti-static bag, get a small box from the post office and put some bubble wrap around the card. Put the card in the anti-static bag first, though.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 9:47 PM on January 4, 2009

If you can't lay your hands on an antistatic bag, wrap the card in aluminium foil, then wrap that in bubble wrap. The foil will do an excellent job of protecting its contents from ESD. The main reasons antistatic bags exist instead of foil are because (a) they're cheaper and (b) the high resistance of the antistatic bag prevents high discharge currents when bag and contents first come in contact. As long as you and the foil and the metal tab on the card are all recently grounded when you wrap the card, there will be no potential difference and therefore no discharge current.
posted by flabdablet at 11:06 PM on January 4, 2009

Static bag - small bubble wrap - cardboard box.

Not static-proof. Static-resistant btw.
posted by ostranenie at 12:08 AM on January 5, 2009

If we're going to get pedantic about it, antistatic bags are neither static-proof nor static-resistant. What they are is conductive. That means that they act as a Faraday cage for anything totally enclosed in them. Foil does the same job for the same reason.
posted by flabdablet at 6:05 PM on January 5, 2009

Static protection is important, but foil will work perfectly. You can probably find the proper bags for free just about anywhere, but if you can't, please don't spend money on new ones!

What are the dimensions of this card? If it is the typical size of modern expansion cards, under 6" all around, you really don't need much packaging at all. A bubble envelope would be enough, if you have one around. On the other hand, if you don't have one to recycle, just skip to the method below.

If it is full length (like 12" long, or whatever) then it will be somewhat more fragile, and you need some structured packaging to keep it safe. This would be the perfect candidate for my roll-your-own-box reusing old cardboard packaging method. One thing I fail to emphasize over there, you want nice square bends everywhere, and you want nice fresh cardboard. So for the card, you want to make your box-roll just a tiny bit bigger than the card, and then pack along with a bit of bubble wrap or some extra cardboard to snug it up. Any extraneous bends will weaken your new box-roll, you want to form it with all clean right angle bends. Also, you can double up the end caps, with the second set going the opposite direction, to get more strength -- corrugate is much stronger in one direction than the other.
posted by Chuckles at 6:15 PM on January 7, 2009