Ok guys, I kinda need some advice. I'll be moving a month from now from California to Hawaii. (I'm going for school, not for sun). Anyway, over the years I've been into pyro and science I've accumulated many scientific items including many chemicals, lab glass, and even a few radioactives. I'm going to be studying Geology, Astronomy, and Chemistry at the University of Hawaii, so over the years I've kind of looked at my chem/lab purchases as investments because it's handy to be able to complete an entire chem lab at home on your own (or bring in better quality chems than your school's lab has). So far, my "investments" in education have served me well in the undergrad science classes I've taken thus far; however, I'm now faced with a problem brought about by my choice in schools.

Namely, how in the hell am I going to get all this stuff over there?

I'm pretty sure that some stuff such as liquid acids (H2SO4, HNO3, HCl) are out of the question, but there remains a lot that I would really like to hold on to and have while I'm there. Most of my chems are solids anyway. So I'm flying out there on the 3rd of January (a month from today), so I need to figure out what I'm doing with everything soon. I've looked into the PODs company and other similar methods where you just fill a trailer up with whatever and they ship it for you, but none of those places service Hawaii. Some of the more fragile and expensive things I'll carry on with me (ghram condensers), but I'll mostly need to ship things. Can anyone give me advice on what's the best shipping company to go with? Or some guidelines on what I can reasonably expect to ship over there? I'm probably not going to take everything I have (15lbs of KNO3 would be a bit excessive), so some stuff I'll keep in storage here or maybe send/sell to other people who have an interest and are trustworthy. I can post my list of chems here if anyone would like to see it. So please, if anyone has any advice as to how I should go about this move, I need to here it soon.

Well sorry for the useless post but all three of those acids are easy to get anywhere if you have a brain (I know you do.) etc.



Good luck my friend!

Yes, i'm specifically not taking some of the chems that i know are easilly re-obtainable. There are lots of hardware stores there.

Go to the shipyard and look into local freight companies. Check their rates and go with the cheapest. Who says you have to take it all by plane?

Honestly it'd probably be better to store it somehow. Only take what you'll use, the rest would just take up space.

DHL is a good company. Friendly, fast, great service, and they rarely look in your shit. Great for shipping chems, drugs, whatever.

As for your leftovers, I may be interested in what you have. You can contact me via msn if you want, xthepyromanx at hotmail dot com.

What about just using up what you cannot move? Or, selling/trading would be a great idea.

Do shipping companies make you state what it is you are shipping? With all the terrorism BS going on lately, would it be possible they could be more suspiscous and search things if they seem suspicous?

I don't have a lot of knowledge about shipping stuff.

yeah, i'm wondering if i should just skip over all the hazmat stuff and just put it all in boxes and ship it. I know i can safely package all the stuff i have, so it shouldn't be that big of an issue. However, would they actually inspect it and come after me? I'm not sure if it's worth it or not ethior way.

just incase ship it as unanimously as possible. Also if you shipped it in multiple small boxes instead of one big box from different locations at different times the chances of bad stuff happening may go down. I'm not sure if DHL will even ship over sea they may do everything out of US continental by air now, look into getting a container my friends dad worked for a shipping country he would ship stuff from china through one of those big containers.

Have a friend ship it anonymously a few days after you leave? That way it -couldn't- have been you. I'm going to second DHL, if you pack your acids properly they shouldn't really care. Maybe re-label stuff or put it in wine bottles or something?