Ceramic object - fiberfill?

[benjamin_wooten]

Hi all! I have not been on the forums in some time. I was a gallery preparator for four years, between 2007-2011. I did some simple packing/shipping there almost exclusively of framed works on paper. After a break from that work, I am now making crates for a handling company in Canada, who is getting into art moving and museum services. As this looks to be a long-term proposition for me, I need to educate myself as best I can, so that I do appropriate work to the proper standards. I do not have the luxury of a mentor up here, so I am hoping to start in these forums.

We are crating a ceramic sculpture for transport from Canada to India. It's been sold to a client, so this is a one-way journey... not a crate for long-term storage or anything like that.

The object is essentially an orb, roughly 18x18x18. The object weighs 10lbs., and there is a 10lb. steel base to make the journey in the same crate. The ceramic piece has a lot of spiky protrusions (see attached image). The artist has a preference for how she has shipped it in the past, however I have some questions/concerns, and seek your guidance.



My plan is to build a 1/2" ply crate with battens, and an interior gator-board box to hold the ceramic piece. Gator-box will be cradled by ethafoam, and the steel base will be bubblewrapped and set in an ethafoam frame on the bottom of the crate.

Inside the gatorbox I am planning on tissue paper around the ceramic, two layers of face-to-face bubble around that, then fiberfill to fill the voids. Is that a good option? You can see from the image that the artist has jammed small bits and pieces of various foams between the protrusions in a past shipment. This worries me... wondering if vibration or shock could transfer in there and spring-fire a chunk of foam against a protrusion and snap it off. Should those spaces be packed with fiberfill instead, before the object gets wrapped in tissue?

As for the ethafoam... the artist says she prefers solid 3" thick all around, which seems really excessive to me. I was planning on 2" thick (at most) strips between crate and gatorbox. Now I am doubting myself, and decided to get more accurate. I started using this chart as a guide. I am interested in learning how to apply this information to this object, and others in the future.

However, I seem to have more questions now than when I started. Have any of you used these charts before to calculate how much foam should be in contact with an object? Do the same rules apply with the box-in-box technique I plan to employ, or are there other considerations? Are there simpler ways/rules to sort these concerns out?

Thanks everybody, any advice or conversation is appreciated.