I've been thinking of late about roadcases. Roadcases for those of you not in the know are essentially shipping crates/cases we use to get stuff (yes very technical at this hour in the morning on a Sunday) from A to B without turning it in to its component bits. There are as many designs for them as there are things to be shipped, so this is really just musings about roadcase culture...
There are a few constants that most cases are built around. The first and most important to me is size of the truck. In an ideal world, all the trucks would be the same size, and you could build your cases the right sizes so the truck pack would work out like a Tetris game. While that's not possible, most trucks are between 8' and 7'6" wide of useable space. (yes, ok, the semis are a little wider than 8', but lets keep this simple) Now, when you are starting from scratch you will want to think about what your "ideal" truck pack would be. Some people go with 4 cases across, some 3, some 2... Some nuts make huge cases that go 1 across a truck, though they are often forced to by the size of what goes in the case... Personally I like the 3 pack. It works well for both scenery and lighting in a general way. Naturally I have cases that are different sizes, but the third pack is my goal... Again, in an ideal world, your cases are third pack in one direction and half pack, or quarter pack in the other direction, so you get some more options as your inventory grows. Most likely you’ll be stacking things on top of your cases, like more cases, so you are going to want a rim or dishes on the lid of the cases to hold whatever you put on top from rolling off... You need to think about the height too. Not only will you have to lift things on top of the cases in the truck, but you need to be able to reach the bottom of the case when it is open, to get that last bit of cable out of it. Again in that idealized place, the height of your cases will be either a quarter, third, or half pack if you plan on tipping your cases off their wheels, or it will be a multiple based on how many you can stack up in a truck. (truck heights vary more widely than their widths, so it gets weird here)
Now, all that seems pretty simple. (ok, go have some coffee, the caffeine will help make that all make sense) Here's where things get hairy... Scenery, unfortunately, does not pack well in generic cases. Those nice even sized boxes work great for lighting and sound since their component parts are small. Scenery tends to come in large chunks with a few exceptions. Most of the scenery I ship doesn't get any case, just a bunch of packing blankets, shrink-wrap, and packing paper, or bubble wrap. Things that can go in cases are podiums, tools, water tables, etc... Things you are going to be using over and over, and are really worth protecting, not to mention making it easier to move them around. So far, I've found that the third pack works ok for this type of stuff. Since most of my lighting cases are third pack, it works out nicely most of the time. (we have some things that are 1/6 pack, so they can double in to a 1/3, the trick is to stay in multiples)
After you've gone absolutely nuts figuring out the outside dimensions of your ideal case, now you have to figure out how to fit objects in to that size. You also now have to determine just how you want to build the cases...
For my nickel, I prefer cases that can withstand anything. If you purchase a case from a roadcase company, it will have anything from a 1/4" to a 1/2" thick wall, and reinforcement along all the corners. They're nice cases generally, and hold up pretty well, but it is possible to impale them with a forklift. While that may seem a strange thing to worry about, remember we work insane hours, and sometimes the fork driver has been in that seat for 20 hours. (Don't tell me that isn't safe, I know that, I'm not in control all the time.) When I build a case, it gets built to take a malicious strike by a fork. They're built with 3/4" birch plywood, and some kind of 3/4" lumber reinforcement on all the corners. (I've used poplar, pine, and next I'm going to try Mahogany since I got a bunch of it for almost nothing and it's just a little off for making furniture with) I tend to put either a full length piano hinge on the lid, or strap hinges butch enough to hold a drawbridge. Our cases get a couple layers of paint, and then off they go. For the most part, we do not manufacture cases for sale, as it ends up costing too much to be competitive with people that do a lot of that work. Our price is also up due to the larger material I choose. The few people that buy cases from me, are doing so because they only want to buy that case once, and know that whatever they put in that case will be protected regardless of what happens.
So what got me on this tangent, was that I have a few I need to build, and the ideal design isn't coming to me. I've got 2 podiums, and 14 striplights I need to crate. This is all for a client, so it isn't my gear, but I store the stuff, and install it all the time, so it might as well be mine. Here's the catch. The cases need to fit through a specific door that is a little smaller than normal, and they need to fit into a service elevator at the facility we usually use them in.
The podiums are a headache because I need to remove the tops for them to get through the door. Building the crate big enough to hold the podium and its top together makes for a huge case, with lots of wasted space. Building them as two separate cases allows for someone to either forget the top, or to grab the top from podium A when we're using podium B. (yea, refer to the long hours when you ask how that could happen) The striplights are yet another quandary. The client wants them to match his other third pack cases, which we can do, though its not a real efficient case that way, and still fit in the elevator. Problem is that the light is only 1" shorter than the elevator, so by the time you build a box around the light, it's now about 3" too long.
I love a good challenge, but getting around the whole space time issue of two objects not occupying the same space at the same time is giving me a headache... By the end of next week I want this issue solved, and cases being fabricated. I will not however going rushing in half cocked on this one... I leave that to the guys over at the soulgrinder...
Aspirin anyone?