Mattress - Ship or work camp
The Buying Network has been providing custom size mattresses for ships and standard sizes for almost 20 years. If you are looking for a crazy shape to fit in the bow, we can do it. If you want 400 of them and send them to Alaska in the space of 50 mattresses, we can do it.
When we put specifications in the mattresses we have manufactured for us, we are not trying to build a $1000 mattress that you would buy for your home. We make these at a fraction of that cost. Your business needs a place for workers to rest comfortably so they are productive employees the next day. The balance is spending just enough to do this knowing that the life of this item is short lived due to moisture from the environment, body fluids, accidental spills, burns and in the case of the ships, G forces making the crew member heavier and lighter all night long working the mattress as hard as that crew member did during the day.
Let's start with the outside of the mattress since this is what you can see and much more important of a topic to ship and plant owners. The term used for the fabric is ticking, which is a cotton or cotton blend material designed to keep the interior, well, inside. The invention of the material was to keep straw and bird feather fill from poking out. The term has stuck over all these years even now we have memory foam and coil springs to contain. Cotton ticking isn't the best for our industry. It soaks up a lot of moisture, can harbor mold and mildew, and create a nice home for bed bugs. We recommend a material that solves those issues, Soflux. Soflux is a polyurethane coated nylon fabric that reduces heat build up and sweating, is a moisture barrier keeping body fluids out of the interior, stain resistant, anti-microbial, anti-fungal and bed bugs can't get through it either. Yes! , a bed bug proof mattress. The poly coating is on the inside of the nylon sleeping surface which gives the crew member comfort.
The inside of the mattress is where all the money is. That is why you can spend over a $1000 for your home mattress. Individual pocketed coil springs, memory foam, cooling gel foams, etc. For the ships, typically there are no springs inside these mattresses. They can give the sleeper a weird ride in the high seas. For the shore plants, the springs are fine and help with shipping cost, which I will explain shortly. The foam that is used in the commercial mattresses can be a single density, or a lamination of different densities to make it feel soft on top but firm enough you don't bottom out.
Shipping these odd sized, light weight, but dimensional large objects by the freight carriers is expensive. The shipping cost to Alaska can put the total cost of mattress replacement at twice the cost of the mattress. What we have done for larger orders is create a unit that has short coil springs inside a traditional foam mattress keeping it at only 6" deep then compress the unit back down to the size of the coil spring compressed, like when the factory gets them. We are able to get 25 mattresses into a crate that takes up only two- half height pallet positions. Each mattress is compressed and bagged, then stacked on top of each other and compressed again. This way when the bands are cut, it's not like a mattress jack in the box.
We shipped 200 mattresses that would have filled one and a half 40 foot containers. After compressing them they were shipped in the space of 14 feet of just one can. We were told cost savings in freight were about $7,000 over shipping them not compressed.
Another method that we can use for compressing is called roll packing. When manufacturing the traditional coil spring mattress, we leave out the metal tie bar on the outside edges of all the coils, then place it in a special piece of equipment that compresses and rolls the mattress like a sleeping bag. This saves approximately 33% in space to ship them. The user never notices the difference. We use this process for standard sized mattresses, like twins or queens used in a lot of seafood shore plants.
Please contact us if you have a need in the Seattle, Alaska area and we would be happy to quote you.
When we put specifications in the mattresses we have manufactured for us, we are not trying to build a $1000 mattress that you would buy for your home. We make these at a fraction of that cost. Your business needs a place for workers to rest comfortably so they are productive employees the next day. The balance is spending just enough to do this knowing that the life of this item is short lived due to moisture from the environment, body fluids, accidental spills, burns and in the case of the ships, G forces making the crew member heavier and lighter all night long working the mattress as hard as that crew member did during the day.
Let's start with the outside of the mattress since this is what you can see and much more important of a topic to ship and plant owners. The term used for the fabric is ticking, which is a cotton or cotton blend material designed to keep the interior, well, inside. The invention of the material was to keep straw and bird feather fill from poking out. The term has stuck over all these years even now we have memory foam and coil springs to contain. Cotton ticking isn't the best for our industry. It soaks up a lot of moisture, can harbor mold and mildew, and create a nice home for bed bugs. We recommend a material that solves those issues, Soflux. Soflux is a polyurethane coated nylon fabric that reduces heat build up and sweating, is a moisture barrier keeping body fluids out of the interior, stain resistant, anti-microbial, anti-fungal and bed bugs can't get through it either. Yes! , a bed bug proof mattress. The poly coating is on the inside of the nylon sleeping surface which gives the crew member comfort.
Solflux Mattress
The inside of the mattress is where all the money is. That is why you can spend over a $1000 for your home mattress. Individual pocketed coil springs, memory foam, cooling gel foams, etc. For the ships, typically there are no springs inside these mattresses. They can give the sleeper a weird ride in the high seas. For the shore plants, the springs are fine and help with shipping cost, which I will explain shortly. The foam that is used in the commercial mattresses can be a single density, or a lamination of different densities to make it feel soft on top but firm enough you don't bottom out.
Shipping these odd sized, light weight, but dimensional large objects by the freight carriers is expensive. The shipping cost to Alaska can put the total cost of mattress replacement at twice the cost of the mattress. What we have done for larger orders is create a unit that has short coil springs inside a traditional foam mattress keeping it at only 6" deep then compress the unit back down to the size of the coil spring compressed, like when the factory gets them. We are able to get 25 mattresses into a crate that takes up only two- half height pallet positions. Each mattress is compressed and bagged, then stacked on top of each other and compressed again. This way when the bands are cut, it's not like a mattress jack in the box.
We shipped 200 mattresses that would have filled one and a half 40 foot containers. After compressing them they were shipped in the space of 14 feet of just one can. We were told cost savings in freight were about $7,000 over shipping them not compressed.
Another method that we can use for compressing is called roll packing. When manufacturing the traditional coil spring mattress, we leave out the metal tie bar on the outside edges of all the coils, then place it in a special piece of equipment that compresses and rolls the mattress like a sleeping bag. This saves approximately 33% in space to ship them. The user never notices the difference. We use this process for standard sized mattresses, like twins or queens used in a lot of seafood shore plants.
Please contact us if you have a need in the Seattle, Alaska area and we would be happy to quote you.
Custom size mattresses for ships and standard sizes for work camps.