I finally finished the custom hard case for my M1A that I bought. It turned out to be pretty nice but I think I can do a little better on the next one.
The first thing you need is the case. I bought a Pelican 1750 case which comes with solid foam so you have to cut out parts of the foam to make it fit. (If you're going to put an M1A in the case, you'll need the 1750 or else the rifle won't fit.) Some cases may come with the kind of foam that you can pluck out what you don't need but I wanted a solid one so that I could custom fit the pieces into the foam.
The next thing is a good way to cut the foam. I bought a hot wire cutter on amazon.com and it worked perfectly. I paid just over $100 for it and I bought some foam glue as well. Here's a link to the cutter if you want one like it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0017NS8H6 I'm sure there are a lot of others on the market but this one looked like the best one to me.
The next thing to do is to lay out what you want to put in the case so you'll know what will fit. I played around with it for a while and decided to put my Colt Combat Commander in as well. (You never know when you'll need a backup.)
Once I knew what would fit, it was time to trace the outlines of all the stuff onto some poster board. I got the poster board at an office supply store and had to tape two pieces together to make it long enough. This part is a little tricky and I tried several different ways to trace the outline. What worked best for me was to take the ink cartridge out of a pen and just use that to trace the outline. A full size pen is just too fat and you'll miss some of the finer details. Sorry I don't have a picture of this step but it's really not that hard to do.
The next step I decided to do something a little different. Most people cut out the shape of the rifle and use that to put on the foam to make the cut. I decided to do just the opposite. I would rather have the poster board protecting what I want to keep instead of protecting what I'm going to throw away and I'm glad I did. In the picture below, you'll see that I cut the poster board down to the same size as the foam and then cutout all of the parts that I'll be cutting out of the foam.
I used a bunch of long tacks to hold the poster board to the foam and it works great. Now here's why I'm glad I cut out the poster board the way I did. When I cut a hole in the foam to insert the hot wire, I'm not worried about cutting into the part of the foam that I'm going to keep. I can cut as big of a hole as I want because this is the part of the foam that I'm going to throw away.
Cutting the foam is time consuming but it really didn't take that long. On my next case, I think I'll take a little more time just because I'm that big of perfectionist and want it to really look good. Going nice and slow really makes a difference. I don't have a picture of me actually making the cuts but again, it's really not that hard to do.
Once the cutting was done, I put everything together to see how it would fit and it worked better than I thought it would. Then I used the glue to glue the foam with the cutout parts to the foam that goes to the bottom of the case. This helps hold it all in place and is strongly recommended.
Here are a few pictures of the final product as well as a picture of the outside with a few stickers that I got.
I have another case that I'm going to use for my M1 Garand and then I'll get another one for my AR. These cases are really strong and I'm not worried about them bouncing around in the back of the truck on the way to the range. My rifles are protected on all sides and they can be locked if needed.
I hope this is helpful if anyone wants to try it at home.
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