Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 NeverEnoughDoomWheels wrote:
Greetings,

I’ve recently been given a brief to design a Warhammer carry case and was hoping for some advice / council. Most of my experience with war gaming is from school or friends’ houses so my knowledge is limited.

Just looking for basic preference information, such as how many figures are usually transported? What’s usually taken such as figures, tools, boards, dice etc.? Does anybody use the Games Workshop’s Figure cases and do they have any issues? Or what do you use instead?

Thanks, any input is much appreciated

Okay, you've got a ton of design decisions to make. The important ones are case design and tray design.

Case Design: There seems to be 2 major designs: Hard case (clamshell) or reinforced fabric (with flat plastic inserts). Reinforced fabric has the advantage of adding pockets to the exterior for books, dice and such, while clamshell is more robust and probably easier to manufacture, though with a larger start-up cost. Reinforced fabric is going to be more labor intensive but with smaller start-up costs.

Tray Design: This boils down to pre-cut holes in the foam or pre-scored foam that the end user can configure himself. The advantage of pre-cut is space efficiency as the walls between cells can be smaller. Pre-scored has the advantage of custom configuration for oddly shaped miniatures. Both designs can be of varying thickness.

In my experience, tournament level play generally can involve as many as 100-150 infantry scale miniatures and potentially dozens of larger miniatures, including fairly large tanks. So a single case probably can't manage a tournament level army unless it's very large. I generally needed 2 of GW's clamshell cases for a tournament army, and those cases held 108 infantry figures each in pre-cut holes, and I had to remove sections of tray, sometimes across 2 levels of trays, to hold vehicles and monsters.

It's probably best to have a ratio of 2 thin trays for infantry to 1 thick tray for vehicles - assuming you're selling the trays bundled with the foam.

I recommend checking out Battlefoam's website http://www.battlefoam.com/. They're what I use these days (reinforced fabric cases with pre-scored and pre-cut trays, you can buy individual trays for a mix of what you need.