We all love our minis, the detail, climax, paintjob (those who have them painted OFC). And as for the things we love, we care for them – and here a problem shows up when we want to go to a friend and carry our collection to kick his army asses.

Some of us use Battle Foam or other professional means of transport, those are great, but way off the grid in terms of cost, for me OFC. So for all of you who want to keep some bucks in pocket and spend them on minis rather than great ways of transport, I decided to show how I made a small carrying case for my DT stuff. The idea as a whole is: make sth from rubbish or cheap stuff. So a DT case on a shoe string budget.
(I have a problem with this inch stuff so don’t be surprised if some inch measures will be strange to you, who invented it and why?!)

First we need a case. Ofc any case or crate will be good. It depends on how you go around the world Those who always have car can even stay with the original box since both the core and RCS boxes are well made and resilient. I like them too much and the core set box looks too good on my board game wall so I let them be and shine for coming years

But, back to subject, I got this case for around 15$ on an internet auction here in Poland.

It’s pretty nice and seems tough enough. Nothing fancy, but for that price… Remember that the case needs to be at least 13cm/5 inches high/deep so you can store the walkers there. The one on the pictures about 15 cm/6 inches high/deep inside. Also when looking and different cases ability to rearrange the interior is highly recommended, you collection is almost sure to grow and that way you can avoid buying new case every time FFG launches a new walker

So we have the case, now we need some stuff that will keep our minis safe and sound. The variety of sponges and other stuff like styrofoam gives a lot of options. I myself after testing few different of them, picked up semi-hard white plastic sponge. It's resilient enough – won’t get easily destroyed or “chipped off” like styrofoam, and is soft enough – it won’t bend most of the figurines.

I got it from some car driving school, they used it as a training dummy. Different kinds of stuff that can be our insider are surely in your house, or your friends house. Cell phones, cameras, loud speakers etc. are most of the time packed in some kind of sponge, search a bit and find the one that will be best for you. Once you have it you will have to glue a few pices together so the layer is deep enough. I Glued about 8 pieces together, it gave me 4 cm/1,6 inch deep foam. This will give enough protection for most inf units.

The stuff you can see at the picture : whit with holes – my sponge insider for lvl 2 inf.
White Styrofoam – used as a tray inside, you will see how
Black, white and pink sponge come from different packages I received in past few months.
Yellow sponge comes from furniture. Most furniture we use day to day has this kind of sponge inside, but in my opinion it is not thick enough, and making holes in it is very hard because of that.

When you have chosen the type of sponge you will use (or found only one) I suggest planning the whole thing and doing some math.You need to calculate how much place you want your soldiers to get, and how much you will convert to your walkers. As can be seen below I left myself enough place for 2 walkers to sand side by side with ease. After that get a marker and draw hight and width lines on your foam so you get nice squares. Do it on the “bottom” so it won’t be seen during normal usage

Next step: making holes. You will need different hole makers for different minis. If you only stick to armor 2 squads then there will be no problem. But when heavier units show up, especially german hvy inf you will need bigger holes for those guys. On the photos I present different devices I used:

First on the right is a copper tube with an old plastic screw on top, next we have simple metal tube, both cheap and available in any hardware store. Last one is a piece of plastic drain pipe. All of them were whetted using devices shown below. Metal tubes are far better with plastic, the edge stays sharper and it’s easier to make holes.

Exact measures (taken from inside, so tube thickness needs adding when planning holes on the foam):
Copper tube:2,8 cm / 1,15 inch
(I suggest making this one a bit wider, mine is bit too small) – armor 2 inf
Metal tube:3,4 cm/1,3 inch – US armor 3 inf
Plastic tube:4,5cm/1,8 inch – most of german armor 3 inv

When you get the tubes just place the sponge on the ground or a table and firmly press it down moving a bit right and left. If you get rugged holes either your tube is not sharp enough or the foam is not very stiff.

Walkers are more problematic. I’m using a foam from loud speakers. You can see that I widened 2 holes, so the US medium walkers fit nicely.

You can also glue together about 16 sponges and make holes for walkers in them ATM I’m sticking to transporting 4 walkers here, ( the fourth is inside that yellow tube, sponge wrapped with duck tape). The insiders from walkers foam are used as transport measure for American turrets, as shown below.

All in all it look's like that, the posters trays etc fit nicely in the lid, and are separated by another foam from the rest.

And the case packed up for transporting allied army.