Arranging works in a crate

When we’re packing more than one artwork into a crate, we use sheets of card to separate the artworks into layers horizontally, back to front in the crate. The card stops the artworks from impacting on each other in transit.

In this crate, only the artwork at the back of the crate is the size of the full crate, the other three are smaller, so to stop them moving side to side we’ve glued blocks made from 50mm polyethylene foam to the card so there is a space exactly the right size for each of the works. This way, when the client opens the crate, it’s ready to load, with a space blocked out for each work.

Marking out the space for each work with foam blocks saves a lot of time and hassle for whoever is packing the crate.

If if you have a lot of works to go into one crate it can take a while to work out what’s the best order to do it, so if you’re stuck, a simple method is to take the single longest work, and the single tallest work, and make that the length and height of your crate. Then arrange your list in order of size and see how many works you can get into those dimensions. You’ll end up with a number of layers of works. Then add up the total depth of all the layers and that’s the width of your crate. Don’t forget to add extra for foam padding all round!

If it gets confusing, don’t worry. Unless all the works are the same size, once the number of works gets any way large it can be daunting. This is a mathematically hard problem, and there is proprietary software out there that gets you the optimum solution, but it’s not cheap. However with a bit of brain workout you can probably get within a few per cent.

If you’re still stuck, e-mail us your list of works and we can figure out what you need :)