The $3 Reed Case

I have a num­ber of nice reed cases: a leather-covered three-reed case that came with my bas­soon, a nine-reed wooden case by Wise­man, and a cou­ple of beau­ti­ful maple cases by Roger Gar­rett. But I always seem to need more lit­tle boxes for trans­port­ing reeds for stu­dents, stash­ing French or period bas­soon reeds, or just to hold over­flow from my other cases. My go-to for this sort of thing is the tried-and-true Altoids tin. But Altoids tins are just slightly the wrong dimen­sions to be a truly space-efficient reed case, and as a result I’ve always got my eye out for other lit­tle tins or boxes. Ver­mints tins are a marked improve­ment (they’re a bit wider and shal­lower than Altoids tins). But I recently stum­bled across some lit­tle hinged plas­tic boxes at the Con­tainer Store that are nearly perfect.

Reed Case Tools and Materials

Best of all, they’re only $2 a pop. Add a ~$1 sheet of foam from a craft store and some tools you almost cer­tainly already have lying around, and you’ve got a seven-reed case for about $3. Here’s all you’ll need to make one:

Mate­ri­als:

• black foam sheet (5-6mm thick)
• medium hinged box

Tools:

• Duco cement
• X-acto or util­ity knife
• ruler

You can buy specially-made strips of reed foam from Reeds ‘n Stuff. I’ve used them, and they work well. But the foam hold­ers in my Wise­man case hold reeds in a more com­pact fash­ion, so I decided to basi­cally copy that design for this case. The Wise­man foam isn’t a purpose-made strip but is actu­ally made up of mul­ti­ple lit­tle pieces glued together: tall pieces to go between reeds, short pieces to go under them, and long strips at the top and bot­tom to hold it all together. Using that method I can fit seven reeds in this 94mm-wide plas­tic case; the Reeds ‘n Stuff strip would only fit five in the same space.

Empty Box and Foam Pieces

The first step is to cut lit­tle pieces out of the foam sheet. The pre­cise dimen­sions will depend on the thick­ness of your foam — mine is 5mm thick. I decided to make the top and bot­tom strips 6mm wide and the entire cen­ter assem­bly 15mm wide. The cen­ter assem­bly is made up of eight 12mm x 15mm blocks (placed ver­ti­cally) and seven 7mm x 15mm blocks (placed hor­i­zon­tally). I neglected to get a good pic­ture of the foam assem­bly itself, but you should be able to fig­ure out how it’s put together from the fin­ished case pictures.

After I cut out all the foam bits, I did a dry fit in the plas­tic box. I hadn’t accounted for the box’s beveled edges, so I had to trim a bit of foam off the cor­ners of the end pieces. After a lit­tle trial and error, I had every­thing fit­ting snugly. I made sure the foam assem­bly was squared up to the edges of the box, and then I used my knife to lightly score the box’s bot­tom to mark the foam’s posi­tion. I removed the foam, and then used some sand­pa­per to rough up the plas­tic where the foam would be glued in. The box’s sur­face is very smooth, so rough­ing it up a bit pro­vides the glue with a bet­ter sur­face to which to adhere.

Then, it’s just a mat­ter of apply­ing glue to the box and to the appro­pri­ate areas of each piece of foam (where they’ll con­tact the box or other foam), and assem­bling it all. I put in the upper nar­row strip first, then built the cen­ter assem­bly from left to right, then applied the bot­tom nar­row strip to square it all up. I cut some more bits of foam in basi­cally a reverse pat­tern so that clos­ing the case clamped it all together while the glue dried. I picked Duco because that’s some­thing we bas­soon­ists tend to have lying around, but cyano­acry­late (super glue) may actu­ally be a bet­ter choice for this sort of plas­tic. Time will tell if I need to re-glue anything.

Since I’m plan­ning to use this as an aux­il­iary reed case, I didn’t bother punch­ing any holes in it. But if you plan to use one of these on a day-to-day basis and antic­i­pate putting your reeds away wet, you should pro­vide it with some form of ven­ti­la­tion. I bet a sol­der­ing iron could melt nice lit­tle air holes in this plas­tic — don’t breathe in the fumes, though.

Two Views of the Fin­ished Case

One note about using this case: the reeds are so close together that you have to tilt them slightly to fit them all in (you can see the tilt­ing and over­lap in the photo above). I’ve done this for years with my Wise­man case, but it might seem a lit­tle strange if you’ve never done it before. There’s plenty of ver­ti­cal clear­ance on both sides for the reeds to sit safely this way, and if you treat both reeds and case with the proper care, this con­fig­u­ra­tion shouldn’t cause any problems.