Monday 1 October 2012

KR Multicase Purchase

I have long been an admirer of KR Multicases. The concept of a modular storage system has been interesting to me since I heard about it. The potential to replace a whole pile of aluminium cases with a pile of cardboard ones appealed to me. Just take the case I need and put it into a shell and I'm sorted.



They sparkle like vampires!
This is not actually the first KR case I have purchased. I picked up an Aquilla 1/4 a few weeks ago to house my Bloodbowl stuff. I was happy to start then, because I knew it would all be transferable. Essentially the Aquila holds one tray, a standard KR case holds 4 or 5. It lets me take a small selection out by itself.

Wow- that was quick!
Last week I ordered a double size, hard aluminium case. Firstly, I should point out that it arrived today. In less than one week. From the UK. The shipping is managed by FedEx, and it's pretty quick. The website claims that it's "free", but by that they just mean that it is included in the price. There are four shipping zones (UK, EU, US and Miscellaneous) and they are not priced equally. So "free shipping" is a little questionable, but if you consider that my double sized aluminium case cost me $155 USD, and it is about twice the size of a GW case ($96 + postage),  with customised contents, I think that's still pretty good.
The Aquilla next to the new case

Inside my case, I had a few different trays. I chose these trays using KR's custom TraySelector. It's not as easy to use as you'd hope; I had to have another tab open with all the trays' specs on them as I used the applet. Not to mention that the applet reset didn't work, nor could you easily remove trays from the simulated case. Once you know what you want, you get a string of tray codes that you put into your chosen case style. In my case I got:

On the left is the large infantry tray, on the right the small
  • 1 small infantry tray. This would be sufficient to hold 50 man-sized troops, provided they weren't posed too aggressively. Each slot can easily fit two goblins.
  • 3 Large infantry trays. Each can fit 36 orc arrer boys, which are some of the biggest most awkward 25mm infantry pieces out there. 
  • 2 deep pieces of pick n' pluck foam, only half-wide. KR offer several sizes of PnP, but none of them seem as useful as 1cm square systems which seem common to other brands. These will house trolls and giant-sized things.
The Kaiser2. I was expecting contents like this.
The trolls, in their plucked holes.
KR have a system of units, 1being the equivalent of one cardboard case (roughly GW case-sized). My case had 2. Trays come in either full or half size, in five different depths. Most of the different depths are multiples of others (1, 1/2, 1/4), but not all of them (1/3, 1/5), so it's not always easy to get what you want to fit nicely. I made the mistake of thinking that a unit meant a cardboard case, so that I would get two cardboard cases (flimsy) inside an aluminium one (hard). This could then be expanded on in the future by simply buying cardboard cases to swap in and out. This is not the case- that only applies to their Kaiser series. My foam was lose in the case.

Alas, I'm a little disappointed at that; my dream of an easy swap in/out system will have to wait. In the  very least, I can still swap the actual trays in/out of the cases, so I'll still have a somewhat modular system.

Comparison with GW. The foam size is pretty comparable.
All told, I'm fairly happy with the product that I have purchased. The price is better than GWs. That's not hard! The foam quality is pretty good, but probably not as good as Minisoft (a great local product that's pretty popular in Australia). For me, the trade-off is customisability and modularity, which are the product's strongest selling points. I look forward to not having to come up with a new casing solution for each new army a build, particularly the big things!

P.S. If you are considering using this product, do it through their website. As I said, customisation is a selling point and I don't think you'd get that through another vendor. If you can get it through another vendor, by all means support them!

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