My rule of thumb these days is to double the number in Pounds Sterling
to get US dollars. That gets pretty close to covering the difference in
VAT and shipping, and sometimes I get a nice surprise.
It's often the case that shipping via a very fast courier is not much
more expensive than shipping as freight via surface. I've never shipped
an engine or gearbox, but I've shipped differentials via air freight -
even though the freight worked out to about $50/each, I consider that a
bargain for the price I got.
UPS delivers overnight from the UK, but most of the vendors that deal
with our cars don't know about it. There's also a service called
Datapost that seems to be like our FedEx - they do air freight of small
packages and seem to be well understood. I've had gearbox pieces
shipped from John Kipping this way with good luck.
There's a company in California called JAE that ships a lot of stuff
from the UK. They're nominally a Lotus parts house, but they're willing
to find parts for other cars. They have some good contacts and some
holes. If you have a vendor in the UK that you want to deal with, you
can call Jay at JAE and give him a part number and contact information.
He'll call the vendor, arrange for overnight shipping, take care of US
customs, and ship it to you COD via UPS. If you don't know the vendor,
he'll find one. He charges in US $, adds a reasonable markup to cover
the overnight/customs/currency costs, and only charges outright for the
UPS from Goleta.
They also do a (more or less) monthly air freight run. If you have something
that you don't need in a great hurry, you can arrange to have your parts
included in their monthly shipment. They handle the customs hassle, UPS you your
bits, and charge you just your portion of the freight. It's a really convenient
way to go for largish orders, and doesn't cost much more than surface.
Tell Jay you heard about them from me.
Name: JAE
Address: 375 Pine, Unit 26
Goleta, CA 93117
Phone: (805) 967-5767
(805) 967-6183 fax
|