I have a small audio mixer, digital recorder, cables and accessories to put in it.
I’d like to organize the 12x12 space into compartments.
I’ve seen references to using the pink foam board from Home Depot and covering it with fabric.
Ideally, make a 4.5 in high, square box with dividers to create compartments inside the case. With something this small. Would the dividers stay in place after the case is zippered closed?
Do I need to glue the foam board’s corners and the other joints together and make a more secure box?
The foam board is 1 inch thick. Easy to cut. I want to cover it in fabric. What Glue should I use?
Titebond, Carpenters Wood glue, a hot glue gun?
Is foam board really a good option?
Gator sells this cube foam. I’ve bought cases that came with this stuff. Requires chipping out squares to make a cavity that fits your gear.
When you’re at Home Depot, look at something like Reflectix insulation, or rolls of the soft foam insulation. You might consider using those on the harder foamboard instead of cloth. That will provide a bit more cushioning for your equipment.
I take a lot of test instrumentation into the field and I’ve always used either cube foam or camera cases with dividers that can be positioned in pre-cut slots. Both options do a good job for me, though I’m not above jamming some of the extra foam cubes in where the space is just a little too big. It seems like a lot of extra work to make dividers from scratch. But that’s just me…
Why not just use some heavy corrugated cardboard, like they put in wine cases? Either cut down some dividers from an actual wine case, if that provides the spacing you need, or put similar slits in pieces you cut to fit.
They will be thinner than the foam board you’re thinking of, and therefore waste less space. Assuming your gear is fairly tightly packed, they don’t need to be particularly strong, but if they don’t last, you can easily make new ones at little cost or trouble.
They may not be as pretty as the ones you are proposing, but you could apply that fabric to cardboard just as easily as foam board. Again, cheaper and easier.
If you want something more durable than either foam or cardboard, thin Masonite could also serve. It would also accept the fabric covering you have discussed. Not quite as simple to work as the other materials, but not exactly titanium, either.
I wouldn’t use the pink foam, as it is sure to break up into crumbs, and cardboard is sure to shed. The guy who builds my cases and bags uses corrugated plastic sheets for rigid parts, and covers that with whatever fabric is needed. He uses one layer, but if you use two layers of Coroplas, one 90 degrees to the other, it should be incredibly rigid and very light.
Ran out of edit time. I would slice notches into the sheets of Coroplast, to fit them together like those old cardboard dividers. You could use cardboard or foamcore to mock the whole thing up, and use those pieces as templates for the Coroplast parts. Then you can cover it with fabric applied using a . It’s going to be much stronger than anything proposed so far, as well as lighter and won’t create any debris like anything made of foam or paper. Here’s the case he made for my Canon XH-A1. All the sides, bottom and top are made of Coroplast sandwiched inside of ballistic nylon. The interior is lined with pig suede - leather made from pigskin, but processed into suede. It wears like a football but is as soft as…suede. Here’s an accessory bag he made. The top, bottom and divider is Coroplast, while the sides are soft. It holds a small Rolls mixer, a quad video processor, two GoPro Hero 3s, a zoom control, four power supplies and four microclamps.
I’ve had this camera bag since 2007, and have used it to shoot more than 300 concerts. I can’t say enough good things about Coroplast as a material to build stuff out of.
I did a search for “Coroplast dividers” and was reminded that the USPS uses Coroplast boxes for handling mail. They have a method of “welding” the sheets together, and they are rugged as all get-out. I would get a sheet, cut rectangles out at the corners, crush the corrugation to make a seam that can be folded up…honestly, I can see how to do this in my mind’s eye, but it’s hard to tell you in text. Here’s an image of an unfolded Coroplast box. It has tabs and slots exactly the same as a cardboard box. If you can make it out of cardboard, you can (with a bit more struggle) make it out of Coroplast. You can put dividers inside of the box, cutting slots for the ends of the dividers in the sides of the box.
There are a bunch of videos about Coroplast on YouTube, including special tools to cut it, heater strips to bend it and nylon rivets to join it. I would up getting sucked into watching them.
