Not many of us frequently ship vehicles to faraway ports. So when you sell your “baby” to someone in a foreign land, it helps to have a trustworthy ‘travel agent’ who will make sure your shipment makes it overseas safely. That’s where a company like CFR Rinkens comes into play.

Recently, we caught up with CRF Rinken’s Joey Giranda. When we asked him to nail down a description of the company, he said they’re “almost like a travel agent for vehicle shipments.” That makes it easy to understand, but it’s the back story that’s even more interesting.

For anyone who has never shipped a car overseas, it’s an interesting process. A shipper sizes up different cars and then actually builds wooden structures inside of shipping containers to hold the cars in place, so that you can ship more than one car per container, thereby dividing the shipping cost. Simple process, right? What hasn’t been so simple in the past, is the process of safely and effectively getting multiple cars into a container. The shipper has had to actually build a series of wooden ramps and structures to stack and layer the vehicles in the container. Then they have to get the vehicles onto these racks, which have to be seaworthy. Finally, someone in the destination port has to figure out how to get the cars off the ramps. You can’t usually just drive the cars onto the wooden structures so some folks use things like fork lifts to get the cars onto these structures, which increases the potential for damaging the vehicle before it even gets aboard the ship. Then you’ve got to get the vehicle back off the wooden structure at the other end.

CFR Rinkens has developed a rack system with a series of pulleys, that allows a car to be driven into a container, and then using the built-in hoisting system, lifts it up so a second vehicle can sit underneath. No forklifts, nothing special, and easy to understand on both ends of the voyage. Even better, according to Giranda, the incidence of damage to vehicles is much lower for a variety of reasons. The first reason is that anybody can figure out how to load and unload the vehicles and no lifting or other special tricks are necessary. Second, they’ve actually slammed containers into a barrier, with the racks in place, to measure damage and the racks stay in place. Mind you, they’re not testing their racks with your vehicles, they used a test vehicle of course. Plus you’re not using a bunch of wood for one trip, which is friendlier to the environment and less expensive. Have you priced wood recently? Gadzooks!

You can easily spot CFR Rinkens at the Pomona Swap Meet where they bring one of their shipping containers to demonstrate how clever, effective and secure their method is. The funny thing is that there are people who walk by their booth and want to buy this system to store their cars. Makes sense – you can store four cars in one shipping container which is far less costly than building a fancy garage!

So if your vehicle has decided it wants to journey overseas, it would seem that CFR Rinkens are the people to see; and the place to find them is at the Pomona Swap Meet! They will be located on the Main Aisle spaces C 21, C22 and C23 at the March 3, 2013 event. You can also visit their website at www.cfrrinkens.com.

This article was written by Tony Barthel from the Curbside Auto Column and Car Show Calendar. For auto articles, news and an on-line calendar of automotive events, please visit www.curbside.tv.

CFR Rinkens booth is very busy with customers wanting to ship cars they are purchasing at the Pomona Swap Meet.

CFR Rinkens booth is very busy with customers wanting to ship cars they are purchasing at the Pomona Swap Meet.

Joey and the team of CFR Rinkens. Behind them is one of their many shipping containers.

Joey and the team of CFR Rinkens. Behind them is one of their many shipping containers.