Padded Equipment Cases: Custom Interiors Are Crucial
Padded Equipment Cases from Bel-Air
Padded equipment cases are a must-have item for any delicate or expensive equipment that needs frequent transport. At Bel-Air Cases, we’ve been designing custom plastic cases with foam for more than 50 years, and we’d like to take a moment to talk about the importance of custom foam interiors and a few facts about our services.
The exterior of our padded equipment cases is built to handle impact. We fully understand the realities of the transportation industry. Whether you are shipping your cases or putting them on an airplane, they will be jostled around, dropped and bumped into other freight. Our cases are designed to take the punishment of transportation again and again.
While, we use durable impact-resistant materials to create each custom case, we also highly recommend that you opt for a custom foam interior as this provides with the highest level of protection possible. The exterior design of your case combined with custom foam, ensures that your padded equipment cases can handle being dropped, banged or jostled without damaging what’s inside.
The team at Bel-Air can provide you with a simple foam liner or a highly customized foam interior with multiple cavities, interior walls, plastic dividers, panel mounts and more, protecting each piece of equipment perfectly. We can provide custom hand-cut or die-cut foam interiors, layers of foam slab or a foam liner to surround all of the inside walls of your padded equipment cases. What we will not do, however, is simply build your case and insert a large piece of diced foam inside the case.
Pick and Pluck Foam vs. Truly Custom Case Interiors
Diced foam, also known as pick and pluck foam, is something many case manufacturers will pass off on their clients, particularly for stock cases, but sometimes even custom case manufacturers simply will provide you with a slab of diced foam rather than creating a custom foam interior. Often, this diced foam costs about as much as custom design, but the quality isn’t even close to what we would provide at Bel-Air Cases.
With pick and pluck foam, the customer has to pick away at the foam to create cavities for their equipment. Not only is this less than precise, this type of foam breaks down quickly and you’ll need to purchase new slabs to ensure that your equipment is protected. Additionally, you’ll end up throwing away a bunch of foam and you shouldn’t have to pay for foam that you won’t even use.
When it comes to luggage, cases and baggage, the airline industry transports hundreds of millions of items each year moving them along miles of conveyor belts, bumping across airports in trams and then loading them up into airplanes. While airlines are supposed to pay for damages to luggage and their contents, every airline has a policy that excludes many specific items and your equipment might be included.
You certainly can purchase travel insurance or shipping insurance to cover a loss, but our padded equipment cases are a kind of insurance all by themselves. Additionally, if your case is ever damaged, we can help! The transit industry is rough on packages, and while we can’t guarantee that your cases will never be damaged, we can assure that we will always repair the damages for as long as you own the case. So, if you purchased a case from us back in 1972 and it needs a little repair or two, feel free to give us a call.
If you need new padded equipment cases, you can give us a call or click on the Request A Quote tab on our homepage. We can provide you with a free quote, and whether you need just one case of 1,000 cases, we will provide you with unparalleled customer service.
Equipment Cases With Foam: 5 Crucial Facts About Foam
While the exterior of our custom cases provides a high level of impact resistance, we also design custom foam inserts for each case. Equipment cases with foam inserts provide a higher level of protection, ensuring that each of your components is as safe as possible. Here’s a quick look at foam in general, and some specifics about our foam inserts.
1. Foam Is A Thermoplastic
We create each of our cases using high-density polyethylene for the exterior, a highly durable, lightweight and impact-resistant thermoform plastic. When you order equipment cases with foam, this custom foam interior also is created from a thermoform plastic. Virtually all thermoform plastics, whether they are foam or rigid materials, are recyclable. So, while your custom Bel-Air Case is meant to last for many, many years, it’s nice to know that all of the components, inside and out, are recyclable.
2. Many Companies Provide Only Pick & Pluck Foam
There are quite a few companies out there advertising their equipment cases with foam, but many of these companies provide their clients with pick & pluck foam rather than a custom foam insert. This means that once you receive the case, you are responsible for plucking away bits of foam in order to create cavities to hold your equipment or components.
3. Pick & Pluck Foam Is Not Ideal
There are several reasons why we recommend avoiding pick & pluck foam interiors. For one thing, this isn’t a truly custom interior, and it’s highly possible that you will end up plucking away a bit too much foam and not really protecting your items adequately. This type of foam also tends to break down rather quickly, so it has a short lifespan. Additionally, you will be paying for a big chunk of foam, but you probably will use less than half of the foam you receive. Why pay for foam that you end up just tossing in the trash bin?
4. Custom Foam Is Your Best Bet
At Bel-Air Cases, we never use pick & pluck foam for our equipment cases with foam. You can either opt for a case with a foam insert or a case with a custom foam insert with cavities designed to fit every centimeter of your products or components exactly. We only use the highest quality foam materials to create our case inserts, and these materials, provide an extra layer of protection and impact resistance for whatever you need to place in your case.
5. Foam Insert Options
As stated above, some of our clients want a case with a basic foam insert, providing an extra layer of protection, but not customized for specific pieces of equipment or products. However, we can go well beyond a basic insert and can handle highly complex interiors with dividers and interior doors. To learn more, go to our Case Options page, which showcases a few pictures of our highly customized foam interiors. This page also highlights our many color options, as well as the wheels, handles, hinges, latches and feet we can affix to many of our cases.
For more than 50 years, it has been our goal to provide our customers with the highest quality custom cases at affordable prices. Whether you need equipment cases with foam inserts, heavy-duty shipping cases, expo cases or something else, we can create just what you need. Contact at us at any time via phone at (866) 235-2472 or you can click on the Contact Us page and fill out our quick contact form.
We Advise Against Pick and Pluck Case Foam Interior
Many case manufacturers use what’s call Pick and Pluck foam in their interiors because it easily creates snug, special shapes and and can conform to many sizes for cases and packaging. At Bel-Air Cases we advocate strongly against using Pick and Pluck foam.
There are two reasons we don’t agree with using Pick and Pluck foam (sometimes called Diced foam too) in our case interiors.
The first reason is the quality of the foam itself. Pick and Pluck foam is die-cut foam that results in foam slabs with perforated cubes. The idea is that by being able to tear away (or pick and pluck) the foam cubes, you can easily create foam cavities for a case interior. It’s actually not a bad idea. However, from previous customer experience it usually results in a terrible overall interior solution. Mainly because a customer will pay for a case completely full of die-cut foam but will end up removing up to 90% of the foam interior. Adding to this problem the remaining foam interior has a bunch of tiny holes or slices left in it. Eventually, with use, it starts coming apart. From customer experience you’ll soon be replacing the case foam interior, if not the entire case itself. There is almost always a better solution than a diced foam interior for your packaging requirements. Bel-Air Cases works with our customers to find the best case interior solutions.
Last, but not least, the other main reason that we recommend against Pick-n-pluck foam is that as custom case manufacturers we associate this method as an easy and lazy foam case solution. Be cautious of any company that advises you to purchase a diced foam case, as manufacturing cases with diced foam requires very little effort, and that shows that they have very little concern for what you’re storing or transporting in your case. Besides that it’s just a bad and lazy design habit.
Benefits of Equipment Cases with Custom Foam Interiors
Why choose a Bel-Air equipment case with a custom foam interior?
When you’re transporting expensive equipment, such as cameras and computers, you need the proper cushioning to protect their value and your investment. Because of this Bel-Air-Cases offers the option to construct custom foam sets for around the same price you’d expect to pay for cases filled with foam slabs or diced foam. We offer a variety of custom foam interior cases to choose from. We’ll even work with you to create a custom equipment case with foam that fits your specific needs. Our expert staff that will take the time necessary to understand specific requirements and design a custom foam interior unique to your needs.
We use foam-cutting machines to handle complex cushioning requirements. We can design and manufacture the interior of the case using a CAD layout, or if our customers already have a specific layout we can adhere to those guidelines. Our in-house tools and equipment make it extremely easy to turn a basic cushioned case into custom designed carrying or shipping case capable of protecting your valuable equipment.
Since Bel-Air-Cases manufacturers made-to-order cases for nearly every industry, we’re equipped with the latest technology to perform quality control and assurance, such as drop testing, to protect your valuables from unforeseen mishandlings and events. Our experts build and test a wide variety set-ups. You can be assured that our made-to-order equipment cases with foam interiors will provide the utmost in protection and durability for your equipment and valuables.
Looking for more information on our custom equipment cases with foam, or curious about our pricing? Feel free to give us a call at (866) 235-2472 for a personalized quote. You can also request a quote online: just fill out our Request a Quote form and one of our friendly customer service specialists will be in touch with you shortly.