Here's how I did it... Once the package arrived on Thursday, I went to town trying to configure THIS case... I was so frustrated that the 'pieces' or dividers or what ever anyone wants to call them weren't the 'right' sizes for me. Yeah, I could have cut down the larger ones, but what to do about the smaller ones? This is when it hit me "hey, that stuff is just corrugated plastic cardboard!" I've build several of my own ATA style flight cases... and I have some materials left over from that... So I went to the garage and pulled out one of the two sheets of the plastic corrugated cardboard (PCC from here on out) brought it inside and went to work cutting my own pieces... sounds like Tom did something similar.

I went to a place here in Phoenix called the "Fabric Depot" (they sell... yah, plus flooring, and other stuff, foam being one of them.) The kid at the shop told me "oh, that's 1/8" foam for sure. All we have in that is white... ours is a 'closed cell' (smooth) not an open cell, but it's darned similar. So I asked "how much is the foam?" He told me it was $4.95 for a four foot wide by 1 yard section... or $4.95 per yard. (Inside I'm sayin' "that's it?") So I decided even though it was white... I'll take some at that price and try it out!

Personally, I decided to use 'spray can glue' as I have about 6 of those (I don't know how or why) in the garage... I have 3M and some other brand, and I've used both on this project. I took the CUT pieces of PCC and sprayed one side... then I put that while 'tacky' on the foam... I set canned goods on top of that for about 5 minutes to help get a good adhesion. Then I took a pair of scissors and cut out the half glued pieces... I took a cutting board out and a brand new exacto blade and cut off the excess foam, just trimming around the PCC. (Yup, I have bled for this project... cut my pinky!) Once I had the first half cut, I did the second and repeated the process... (I set some news print down on my porch and sprayed the stuff on that, so I didn't make a mess).

This is where I got the idea to only have 'half foam' on a couple of divider pieces! I was having trouble getting EVERYTHING to fit in the case... I realized "if it was just 1/4" narrower... it'd all work out... but how do I do that?"

Once I had the first cases dividers done... I looked at the picture I posted... it looked pretty good. The TP stuff is PERFECT in terms of cuts, being 'square,' etc. Mine is close... but not perfect. My buddy Daniel Murphy said to me "if you didn't have that black around the outside, it would look like you bought it this way!" Well that was enough to get me going on that!

I won't lie... I used the ORIGINAL TP pieces for that outer edge as a template to make my inner edges. I laid their pieces on the PCC and just took a sharpee and made sure the pieces were the same size. In fact, I even cut the PCC this time by using their pieces as the straight edge. Now my pieces were more closer to 'perfect', as the T-square did a decent job... but I wasn't keeping it held in place very well... and the TP pieces are 'taller' to get a good side edge to cut along.

This was the trickiest part... TP ingeniously figured out how to allow their pieces to 'round' corners and such... If you look at the PCC closely, you see these little boxes 'inside...' i.e. chambers or what have you. To make the 'corners... they take a chamber and cut along the 'lines' in the PCC and cut out a full chamber on ONE SIDE only... leaving the back side. Then the chamber that is the neighbor is left standing and they remove the chamber in the third position... so it's like they've created two gaps. What this allows the PCC to do is when you bend into the gaps, it rounds out! COOL! Genious, actually... however... cutting that shit is HARD! I went all the way through on the first two... had to start over (got a new section of dividers out of those parts!) So then it hit me again... "wait... lemme try gluing the foam on the backside FIRST...Trimming that out... then I'll cut the chambers out...That worked GREAT because if I did go too far with the Exacto knife, the foam still kept everything together!

TP makes the outer edge out of two pieces and each piece has two corners in it... I lined up my piece with foam, and their piece and then I just cut the same grooves out using a metal square/ruler. This worked out GREAT! But... "How do I cut out the foam to match? That proved to be a bitch on the first successful piece!

On the subsequent pieces.... I decided to 'mark' the corners (which are the red dots you see in the photo) and I glued the foam down and trimmed it partially so I knew which side to cut my gaps! Same process... I lined up the TP and mine and was able to cut out the grooves MUCH better!

Now after all that is said and done... I found a place online that has stores nearly everywhere that SELLS the PCC WITH 1/8" foam already glued onto it! It's about $18-20 per sheet! I'm going there on Monday! They sell about 30 colors of the PCC! I may have to get neon green with the foam on it! That would look RAD! (I've thought about different colors for different cases!)

I think you can easily make 5-6 cases worth of inserts with one 4'x8' sheet of PCC! I've done two and I'm not 'halfway' through the sheet yet! If anyone is daring enough to try it for themselves, I can supply measured dimensions for the cuts and such. It's not hard... just a bit time consuming at the start. I put on the TV... watched or listened to a couple of movies I'd seen but like, and just got lost in it all! (I think once you get it all down, you can really move through cutting the pieces rather quickly! There's not much to it, especially if you buy the pieces with foam already on it! You've eliminated several steps and product waste!)