War Store EconoBox Cases
I’ve been using the War Store EconoBox cases for awhile. The idea of having easily stack-able “platoon” sized boxes for Flames of War really appealed to me. When you need a platoon, you can just pull it off the shelf and toss it in a wheeled roll-aboard suitcase. Foam alone doesn’t stack really well, and its a PITA to label and shuffle around when you need to get to something on the bottom of your stacks. These cases solve all that. The white corrugated cardboard boxes are easy to label, rigid enough to stack, and easy to pull out the bottom one from under a stack of ten of them.
For those of you familiar with the Sabol Army Transport foam, these trays are significantly larger, but use the same type of foam with the same size cubes. Just be aware that it won’t fit in your bags even if you take the foam out of the boxes. Compared to Crystal Caste Battle Hive storage, it has cubes about twice the size. The foam texture seems to be the same.
They come in two sizes now. The 1.5″ deep cases that work really well for most everything in FOW without having a ton of wasted headroom. 1.25″ would be better for most tanks and infantry, but 1.5″ allows for some of the bigger transport, and artillery pieces I have. The also have a new “Fuzz Box” which is 2″ deep but instead of pluck foam, it has 1″x1.5″ precut holes. It’ll store 66 figs, and the holes come with the plugs still in them. I haven’t used the “Fuzz Box” but it appears to be of the same construction.
One disappointment with the cases is that the pluck foam isn’t glued down to the base sheet. This means you can’t just lift the foam out of the boxes if you like. I tried using some 3m spray adhesive to glue the foam down and that didn’t hold. If the slots are tight you risk pulling up the pluck foam every time you remove a figure, and that can cause everything in the case to shift. Its annoying to have to reshuffle the case frequently because of this. The top sheet wasn’t glued either, but at least is was easy to take care of. The other thing to keep an eye on is that the boxes aren’t exactly the most durable material. You’ll need to transport these in another case of some kind to prevent the foam from getting beat up prematurely.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the EconoBox case, especially for FOW since they allow me to organize by platoon and only pull the units I want. I almost wish they offered half size boxes as well so I could fit smaller units into their own box as well. If I could just figure out a way to get the foam to stay down I think I’d be alot more happy with them.