How do you pack your rig?

[Shasta_man]

I'm going through this right now. I was tired of lugging the housing and everything else and carry-on rules have tightened. I have an metal Ocean Images housing. I didn't want to go Pelican because they say "gear worth protecting" and I'll still be stressing.

My first attempt was to buy a normal hardshell suitcase and use part for housing and part for clothes, etc. Hardshell is tough these days because they either have ABS which can crack or polycarbonate which doesn't crack but does deform, though it goes back into shape. Concerns I had were anchoring the foam so it didn't move around. Next was making a foam set which fit together tightly but easily. Consider that the TSA (etc) could open it up and close it again. They don't care about putting it back together right. Next was filling all of that open area with clothes and gear so the foam has nowhere to go.

After considering all that, I decided to reconsider what is important. So I'm putting everything non-essential in checked luggage. I'm going to put the housing into a camera gear backpack I have, with video camera, in a little case, hung on the outside. I'll carry my reg bag on separately as my "personal" item. Worse come to worse, I'll put the reg in my smaller hardshell bag. I can replace the regs on the trip, but not the housing.

 

[driftin' by]

I don't have strobes yet but I pack a G9 Ikelite housing and a Powershot A95 inside a Canon WD-50 housing with o-rings out along with 2 regs, 2 Atomic SS1's and 2 computers in a soft-sided Samsonite wheelie. The regs and computers don't commingle with the housings because they're kept in their padded Akona reg bags which may be overkill. I do little else to protect the housings except for covering the ports because as long as the bag is in my hands, it's not gonna get thrashed... too much.

The G9, video cam, batteries, mp3 player, head phones, Archos PVP, memory cards all go into a LowePro camera bag which then fits in my Stahlsac backpack.

It's good to see other's going the soft side Samsonite route. For the price and weight, you can't go wrong but I also like it's inconspicuousness. BTW, I noticed that Akona had a soft-sided carry on camera bad that I may check into. Anyone using this?