I started out with just one or two watches carefully placed alongside each other in a small unpadded box but then "Sales Corner" messed everything up and I realised I needed a better sort of storage to protect the watches. I decided on making a watch box from a Pelican case after seeing some of the nice photos in these threads, particularly Ian's (a.k.a. Backward point) in this thread:
Building a Peli Case Watch Box (text and picture heavy)
...and a post by "richnyc" in this gargantuan thread of 220 posts all about Pelican cases:
Thrilled with new PELICAN CASE
I finally settled on the Pelican 1170 case in Desert Tan colour, as it is one of the flattest in height terms, while enabling you to store 7-10 watches depending on layout in a relatively compact size.
I ordered it from 3d-cases.co.uk costing £38.82 plus VAT plus delivery. The lack of competition in Pelican pricing in Europe, and vastly cheaper prices in the USA, was discussed in this thread:
The box arrived, and it was exactly the high quality that I was expecting. Everything functions very nicely and the two-stage release levers are a whole lot easier to use than the old style. Now the question was how best to arrange the layout of the watches and cut the foam accordingly. The Pelican cases have what they call a "Pick 'N' Pluck" foam insert, which essentially means it is half-cut into cubes making it very easy to create shapes that fit your contents. The 1170 model is a grid of 19 squares width, 10 squares height, and about 3 squares in depth.
Around the edges is a 1-square-wide uncut surround, and underneath is also a 1-square deep uncut layer. The whole foam insert removes out of the case making the cutting fairly easy.
I currently have 8 watches but was hoping to create 10 spaces as per Ian's layout in the first link above. Because I'm an obsessive git and didn't want to mess it up, I created a grid layout in Photoshop and then experimented with different options:
I was pretty much settled on a 10 watches layout of five 5x2 holes and five 4x2 holes, giving me 10 spaces:
But then after putting my watches in these positions they seemed a bit uncomfortably close together. So I decided to drop down to only 8 spaces but in a nicer layout that allowed more space between each watch. In this design there are three 4x2 holes for smaller watches, three 5x2 holes for bigger watches, and two 6x2 holes for larger watches with stiffer straps.
In case anyone else ends up with the same case and is wondering about different possible layouts, I have uploaded all the alternate layouts I came up with here.
I used broken-in-half wooden cocktail sticks to mark out the above layout on the foam, and then carefully used a sharp knife to cut out the holes. I tried to keep the block of squares for each "hole" intact so that I could re-use these blocks as cushions for each watch.
I played around with using the cushions, but in the end I decided to just place the strap in the hole with the watch head sitting on top of the surrounding foam. It seems easier and quicker to get the watches in and out.
I am very happy indeed with the final result. In retrospect I perhaps should have got a slightly larger case to allow for future Sales-Corner temptation. As I said I was hoping to squeeze 10 watches in and while you could indeed do that, especially if none of them are large, I felt the 8 watch layout was better overrall. There are some photos of the final result below, but first I want to give a big 'thank you' to Ian who in the true spirit of the forum spent a load of time in email discussion giving me excellent advice about the various details.
PS - In case anyone is wondering, these are the watches:
Top row: Swiss Army, Speedbird III GMT, Sekonda Tideranger
Middle row: Crepas El Buzo, Kemmner Bund
Bottom row: Modded Seiko SKX007, Tactico TC2, Sekonda Tideranger Ana-Digi
PPS - If anyone was wondering, here is what it looked like layed out with....
10 watches: (They do fit, but are a bit close together maybe risking hitting each other at some point, which as Ian correctly pointed out, defeats the whole purpose of the exercise)
9 watches: (this fits better than 10, as long as the center watch is a small one)
8 watches - alternate layout: (this has plenty of room and is a good layout, I just thought the one I used was prettier)
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