Trihonda -- very nice the way you put that together! To me, that's a great illustration of getting the size that fits your needs and customizing the case.
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I just did some measurements of my Pelican 1510 case. The pick-n-pluck foam pads are 2.5” deep. Here are the inside measurements.
Length | Width | Depth | Cubic ” | 20.19 | 11.38 | 7.57 | 1739.3 |
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If you wanted to, and I considered this, you could get the Pelican 1560 case, 20 lbs. with these dimensions:
Length | Width | Depth | Cubic |
20.375 | 15.4375 | 9 | 2830.85 |
Here are the outside measurements of most of the 4x25 boxes with the most that would go in one of those two Pelican cases a certain way. They do vary in size slightly. Measurements below are in inches.
Boxes | Length | Width | Depth |
1 | 6.625 | 3.625 | 1.75 |
2 | 13.25 | 7.25 | 3.5 |
3 | 19.875 | 10.875 | 5.25 |
4 | | 14.5 | 7 |
5 | | 18.125 | 8.75 |
6 | | | 10.5 |
7 | | | 12.25 |
8 | | | 14 |
9 | | | 15.75 |
10 | | | 17.5 |
11 | | | 19.25 |
12 | | | 21 |
Since I have the 1510, that's what I'll work with here. My case has 2” of padding in the bottom. If I removed all but .25”, I could get another layer of boxes in if I place them L to the long sides and stacked on top of each other. That would allow 3 layers of boxes (total 5.25 inches), or 1400 chips instead of 1000.
My case has 3” of padding on each side. I could remove 1.75” on each side and get two more boxes placing them L front to back.
My box has, from front to back, 1.125” of padding in the front and .625” of padding in the back (total of 1.75” – enough for another box going that way if you eliminated the padding entirely).
18 of the boxes could be fit into a space of 11” x 13.75” x 5.5”. The would involve 2L x 3W boxes flat on either the top of bottom, and 2L x 6D boxes. That would involve removing, basically, the front to back padding and using .25” in the bottom.
The Pelican 1510 weighs about 16 lbs. empty. Put in the foam, lid organizer, and the stuff I have in the lid organizer and I’m just guessing no more than 10 lbs. The 4.25 boxes are light, maybe 2 oz. each.
The weight of chips is (rounded):
# of Chips | 9 | 9.5 | 10 | 10.5 |
1000 | 19.85 | 20.95 | 22.1 | 23.2 |
1200 | 23.9 | 25.14 | 26.5 | 27.8 |
1400 | 27.8 | 29.33 | 30.9 | 32.41 |
1500 | 29.8 | 31.42 | 33.1 | 34.8 |
1600 | 31.75 | 33.51 | 35.3 | 37.1 |
1800 | 35.72 | 37.7 | 39.7 | 41.7 |
I know this is technical info, but my point is to give you a way to measure how many chips could fit in the case. Without padding, it would hold no more than 36 boxes, and probably less than that (by 2 maybe) to account for the wheel wells. You can see though that would involve 72-84 lbs. of chips. The case would hold that, but I think that would just be too heavy to be practical. If I put 1800 chips in mine, I’d expect it to weigh about 60 lbs. My current case weighs over 40 lbs.
If I were going to try to fit more than 1400-1500 in a case, I'd go with the bigger case. One other thing the padding does is keep the box quiet in transit. I think if there was a side without enough padding you would hear the boxes and chips rattling around in there. I've never tried it, so I don't know for sure.