Fitting a Pelican Gun Case

A good sturdy travel case for your firearms is one of those often overlooked, but incredibly important. And once you have one incredibly invaluable, types of accessories that go along with anyone who collects firearms, goes to and from training, goes to the range. Of course, even if you're hunting, or if you've got that defensive firearm that you want to make sure is taken care of when you're transporting it, something like this Pelican case is just about perfect. Now the thing about a Pelican case it's great, is it's incredibly sturdy. It's incredibly rugged and it seals up really tightly. So what you're gonna find when you get one of these cases, is that the foam is completely matched. So the foam that's in the top of the case and the foam that's in the bottom of the case, is matched. If you take all of your gear and you start trying to put it in there, may be your medical kit, your sling, and you're gonna put a magazine in there, you're gonna put a rifle in there. We're gonna put a pistol in there and then we're gonna try to close it up. You're gonna have a hard time. Now you could probably stand on it, stomp on it, press down, and finally get it closed. But one of the great things about these types of cases is that you can customize the foam so that it actually fits your gear. Now, if you've got a lot of different gear that you want to put in there you can be generic about it. You can cut out one area for a rifle, one area for a pistol, maybe an area for some different magazines, and then one generic gear area that you're gonna put things like this medical kit, or like this sling into. Maybe you're gonna put your cleaning kit, something like that into this area. So, how do we go about doing that? Well, I'm sure everybody's got a little different way that's had a Pelican case. But I thought I'd show you my way today, and you can decide if this one's gonna work for you. What I'd like to do is lay out the gear in a way that makes sense. So, I'm gonna keep a generic gear pocket down here, one that I could put a cleaning kit in. In this case, I've got my safety kit. I've got a sling. Maybe I have some pistol magazines, maybe I even have some ammunition that I'm gonna be storing up here. I'm gonna use most of the case, of course, to hold a rifle. Now I'm not gonna cut out the exact outline of this optic because I might be using a different rifle at some point. I might want to put something in here without an optic, and I might want to put something in that's not exactly like an AR. So I'm gonna extend the stock a little bit, and I'll cut out around there. And then I'm gonna have an area here for some rifle mags and I'm gonna have a pistol area cut out as well. And again, I'm gonna go a little bit larger than this Glock 26L because I might want to carry a full size or a true mid-size gun at some point. So, I would much rather have this completely contained underneath this piece of foam, the bottom piece of foam, and know that it might shift a little bit laterally, but not have to worry about, standing on top of the case to get it closed, or just take this middle foam out, and have these things able to brush up against each other. That's really what you want to do, is protect these items from bumping into one another. So you don't need a perfectly tight fit, unless of course you're gonna fit the case to one set of gear, and you know that it's gonna be dedicated for that. Because I travel around and do a lot of different things throughout the year, sometimes I'm doing videotaping, sometimes I'm doing rifle classes, sometimes I'm going on a hunting trip, I'm gonna have a lot of different types of gear. Also I demo and use, and test and evaluate a lot of different types of rifles, pistols, magazines, and other gears. So I want to be more generic in the way I lay my case out. These cases aren't cheap. So you probably want to be generic with your first one or two as well. And then if you have one particular rifle, maybe your one hunting rifle that you take with you on long trips, that way you might want to have a dedicated rifle case just for that piece of gear. So let's take a look at what we're gonna do next. You're gonna need two things. You're gonna need a sharp knife, maybe a utility knife, razor cutter, or just this skinner type knife here. This is gonna be very sharp. And some kind of a marker. You're gonna use the marker to outline the guns and the gear. Now, what I like to do is go just a little bit smaller of course, then I'm gonna cut. That way I don't end up with the pin marks left right there in the foam that's left behind. So if I take this stuff and just kinda, generically ball it up, I'm going to give myself a box up here for this gear. And depending on how detail-oriented you are you might want to get out the straight lines and get the ruler out. I'm not that detail-oriented honestly when it comes to stuff like this. So I'm gonna be pretty generic about the way I cut out these spaces. And again, as I said, with the pistol area, I'm definitely gonna be cutting that out a little bit larger than this gun. With the rifle mags, I can be pretty generic as well. I might have a .308 Rifle or something like that in here at some point, something larger than a typical AR magazine. Like I said, I'm gonna extend the stock out a little bit and that'll give me a little cheating space to accommodate different types of rifles. I'm gonna have the pistol grip area, of course, which we aren't going to have if I have a hunting rifle. And we're gonna give ourselves a little bit of room on this rail, but this is really where it becomes important to make sure that we have that standoff space between our pistol, our magazine and our rifle area. So it's gonna be that piece of foam that's left behind, that actually lets us protect these guns and these equipment from bumping up against one another. So I'm gonna come back in here and leave a little space for different rails or a front sight post. Come back to this side. Again, leave that area open for all different sorts of optics. And then we'll come back down in here and close out again behind the stock. All right, now I've got that middle layer of foam, I've taken it out. I've got my drawings on there. And I'm just gonna go ahead and take my sharp blade and start making my cuts. And again, I'm gonna make it just outside of my drawings. And try to straighten some of this out a little bit. Again, I know some people are gonna be really, really detail-oriented here and want each one of these lines to be perfectly straight. Want everything to be, exactly matching the contour and outline of their rifle and their gear. And that is definitely not my MO. I'm gonna just want to get some minimal protection and some maximum utility. Now, the other thing that you can do of course, is you can get different middle layers. So you might get a few different pieces that go into the middle of any given, size case that you have. And that means you can pull them off the shelf for different gear. So if you're going to a rifle class with an AR, you pull out the AR middle layer. If you're going to a rifle class within AK-47 style firearm you can pull out that middle layer. You're going on a hunting trip, you have to pull out your precision bolt action middle layer. May be a pistol class, you're gonna pull out the one that holds your hearing protection and 12, 10, 15 different magazines. All right. So, I'm just about done here. And as predicted these aren't the straightest, cuts that have ever been made, but they certainly will accomplish the goal of creating a bunch of little storage areas for my gear. So, I'll get this middle layer out of the way, and get our case back up here. Get the knife out of the way, pop that open. You see, been used before obviously. Brought it out here just for this demonstration that I've shared with you guys to get it set up the way you'll want to do it, when you get a good travel case. And believe me, I did have to jump up and down on it and stomp down on it to get the gear in there and make it travelable. So, we've got that. Now we just start laying the gear in. So I've got this little compartment here generically for the medical kit. Pistol falls in there really nice. AR mag in there. AR fits nicely in there. And now everything's gonna be nice and compact. It's protected as this moves around. It's not hitting anything else that's metal. That little bit of movement isn't gonna do anything. Same thing here. This pistol moves around, but if it were a full-sized pistol, it would fit more snugly. There's also a little bit of give here. If I had a pistol that was pushing up, that's fine. It's pushing up against the two pieces of metal. So that's fine. It's not the two piece of the metal touching each other, we've got the foam in between. And now very easily I can put that down and close these up, throw a padlock on it and fly, leave it unlocked, throw it in the back of the FJ Cruiser tour truck, whatever we're gonna do. get this where it needs to go, get my gear where it needs to be without risking damaging it. And again, it took about 10, 15 minutes to get set up properly. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna want to do to set up one of these more expensive, but very high quality travel cases. So that it's one of your most valuable and important pieces of gear.