Eight hundred sets of custom ball screws left our warehouse this week, headed to a customer in Turkey. The photos show the shipment staged and ready - multiple wooden crates stacked and strapped, metal corner brackets on every box, steel banding across each crate. For a large-volume order of precision components crossing by sea, the packaging is not something to cut corners on.
This order was produced to the customer's own drawings rather than pulled from standard catalog stock. Custom ball screw production is a different kind of job from filling a shelf order - the shaft diameter, lead, thread length, end machining, and overall length all have to match the drawing exactly, because the screws are going into equipment that was designed around those specific dimensions. Any deviation from the print shows up immediately when the customer tries to fit the screw into their machine, and with eight hundred sets on the line, getting it right the first time matters a lot more than it does on a small trial order.
The screws in this shipment are compatible with several nut types: SFU, BHSR, SFE, and SFS. That range covers most of the common flange and cylindrical nut configurations used in CNC equipment and industrial automation. Offering compatibility across multiple nut styles gives the customer more flexibility when they are sourcing nuts separately or standardizing across different machine models in the same product line. The ball screw shaft geometry is what drives compatibility here - as long as the thread form, diameter, and lead are held to tolerance, the nut fits regardless of which series it comes from.
Wooden crating was the right call for a sea freight shipment of this volume. The journey from China to Turkey by sea involves weeks in transit and multiple port handling events along the way - loading, unloading, container transfers - each one a chance for something to shift or take a knock. The crates visible in the photos are built solidly: corner-bracketed, banded, and wrapped in plastic sheeting on the outside. Precision ground threads on a ball screw do not recover from a hard impact the way a structural steel part might. The humidity inside a shipping container over a long voyage is another factor wooden crating handles better than cardboard. What leaves the factory in spec needs to arrive the same way.
Customers requiring custom ball screws produced to drawing - single prototype quantities or full production runs - are welcome to submit drawings for quotation.
