Flying with Guitars and photographic Equipment
Flying with Guitars and Photographic Equipment
By Bruce Lamb
http://www.CaseXtreme.com
If you are a guitar player or band member or make a living with anything that can be broken on an airplane or flight on any airline this article is for you. I invented a case that is 100% used and intended for protecting anything if you use airline travel. Although if you travel or ship anything on UPS, FedX or other shipping companies please listen up this article will save you money and grief if you are traveling with something that you don’t want destroyed while traveling.
First I’ll give me some of my background. I have been a videographer for 23 years and am also a guitar player. I was traveling with a group of well know acoustic guitar players and was in Las Vegas at a the (NATPE) trade show. This is a trade show where companies buy and sell television programs. I was promoting a show concept on learning to play guitar and had these guys playing in my booth. The name of the show is “The Guitar TV Workshop“ which is now an online lesson website were you can by DVD guitar lessons or take lessons on line. There are hundreds of hours of lessons on learning to play guitar on Acoustic Blues to Hawaiian Slack Key, or Ki ho ‘alu. The web site is
http://www.TheGuitarWorkShop.com The Artist or Instructors playing in my booth were
John Cephas, Martin Simpson, Woody Mann, and Orville Johnson all award winning players.
When I arrived in Las Vegas and went to get my bags, camera equipment, and guitars everything looked fine. I went to the hotel checked in and we hit the town. When I returned to my room I thought I would play a bit of guitar. That’s when I found the problem. I grabbed my National Steel guitar and when I started to play it just went thunk. The bridge got pushed in from something heavy being put on top of the case or a baggage handler inside crawling over it. The cone got pushed in as well and when I called the airline they said I only had 4 hour to file a claim. Or I got your screwed.
That evening we all went to dinner and we all talked about the problems of traveling with our guitars and me my photographic and video equipment. All the instructors were using the same type of travel guitar cases. They were heavy cases around 28 lbs. each and very expensive over $750 and up. The thing is that they all said that these were the best out there. When I asked them have they ever had their guitars broken in them they all said yes. That’s when I decided that something had to be done. I wanted to design a case that could protect your instrument or camera gear and be affordable.
After 3 years of research and trial and error I designed the Clam Guitar Flight Case, and started http://www.CaseXtreme.com . I knew that one of the major problems with every other case out in the world was that they were too heavy. The old story “the heavier they are the harder they fall” made total sense to me, I knew that to invent a case that would work needed to be light in weight and have adequate shock resistances built into the design.
One day the light bulb hit me like a ton of bricks. I had just received a DVD player in the mail that I ordered. I order stuff all the time from a company out of state so I don’t have to pay state sales tax. For large ticket items this can save you a bunch of money. Anyway this equipment had Styrofoam pads on each corner in a cardboard box that had space around it so nothing is touching the equipment.
So now I had a very sturdy material and I found the toughest foam money can buy and I designed the Clam by CaseXtreme. http://www.CaseXtreme.com I designed the foam suspension system or foam C-Pads that go around your guitar case or gig bag and found the shock absorption system was born. Here is a link to a video on my site of me throwing my guitar off my roof top in the Clam case onto the pavement. http://casextreme.com/newest_video.html
For Guitar Lessons on DVD’s and Online taught by Grammy Award Winning artist and instructors, teaching acoustic guitar, blues, fnger style, Hawaiian Slack key guitar (Click Here)