Unusual shipping scenario.

I have a customer who will be
shipping items by weight and if over 150lbs it will be shipped via freight rather then UPS. The problem is that the fright shipping is measured by total weight and not by weight of each box.

I've gone into configuration -> shipping/packaging and changed the max box weight, but this effects both the table and ups rates.

effectively I need a table rate solution that does not charge per box but on the total weight of the shipment. Will I need to hack the tablerate.php and create my own shipping module/class or is there a better way?

With the way that the table rate says it will calculate is that it is based on total weight but seems to be based on max box weight * number of boxes. Is this how it's supposed to calculate?

I've been looking into this further, it seems that the configuration -> shipping/payment max box weight is overriding the weight of the order in such a way that the Estimate Shipping Costs says that the weight is only of the max box weight rather then the weight of the entire order. This prevents the shipping modules from getting the weight of the entire order to base it's calculation ( at least appears this way) I don't know if this should be classified as an issue with the shipping module(s) or with the shipping class.

looks around from Linda

fixed it with this hack, ONLY recommended to get table rates to work on weight of TOTAL ORDER and not on weight of each box. There really needs to be setup to choose weight of total order vs weight of individual boxes.

in /includes/modules/shipping/table.php
line 90 change from

global $order, $shipping_weight, $shipping_num_boxes, $total_count; 

to

global $order, $shipping_weight, $shipping_num_boxes, $total_count, $total_weight;

Line 99 change from

$order_total = $shipping_weight;

to

$order_total = $total_weight;

Line 116 change from

$shipping = $shipping * $shipping_num_boxes;

to

$shipping = $shipping; //* $shipping_num_boxes;

The rates that show under estimated and check out will still say how many boxes of the max box weight there will be but will base the rate on the weight of the total order rather then on individual boxes. This also still allows the other modules to base their rate on individual boxes