Until this week, every Bench Brass case came in black. It's a good color for a case. It hides scuffs, it goes with everything, and it disappears into the bottom of a bag. That last part is also the problem.
So every case now comes in four colors, and you pick the case and the lid separately.
The four
Black is still the default, for all the reasons above.
Army Green and Army Beige are the quiet ones. Earth colors that sit well on a plywood bench, on a shelf of other gear, or in a range bag.
Burnt Orange is the one you can find: at the bottom of a bag, under a bench, or in the grass where you set it down.
Why the lid is its own choice
Stack a few cases on a shelf and the lids are what you see. Once the lid has its own color, it can tell you what's inside without opening it. Put an orange lid on the case with the match rounds and a green one on the practice rounds, and you'll never grab the wrong one on the way out the door.
Four case colors times four lid colors is sixteen combinations, on each of the Pocket, Day and Range. Here is every one of them on the Pocket:
Colors came from a change of material
Colors weren't the plan. They're a side effect of a material change earlier this month.
We had been printing in a glass-fiber-filled filament. It's stiff and it looks good, but two things kept bothering us. First, glass fiber is abrasive, and every time you open the lid it would be rubbing against the brass hinge pins, for the whole life of the case. Second, filled filaments shrink differently from the acrylic lid window as they cool, and that difference can bow a window lid.
So we moved every part of the case to a single high-temperature PLA. There's no fiber to wear the pins, and it shrinks closely enough with the acrylic that the window lid shouldn't bow. It also warps so little that the lids print lying flat again. The old material needed them stood up at an angle to stay true. And it comes in a real range of colors, which is where this post started.
What changing material meant for testing
Switching material isn't just a new spool on the printer. Every plastic prints holes a little differently, and a case like this is full of holes that matter. The latches and the lid linkage turn on pins. Too tight and they bind; too loose and the lid rattles.
So before anything else, we printed a test bar in the new material: a row of holes stepping up in size a hair at a time. We pushed a pin through each one and took the smallest that turned freely. The answer came out a tenth of a millimeter bigger than in the old material. That doesn't sound like much, but it's the difference between a lid that swings and one that sticks. Every latch and link part was re-cut to match.
One honest note on the material: PLA doesn't like heat, including this one. A bench, a shelf or a closet is fine. A truck cab or a dashboard in July is not.
About these pictures
Every image in this post is a render, not a photograph. We make them from the same files that go to the printer, colored with the values the filament maker publishes for each color. They're close, but real plastic varies a little from batch to batch and looks different under different light. Photographs of printed cases in every color are coming. Until then, the renders show you what goes where.
Still on the bench
We're testing a light textured finish on the lids, something closer to bead-blasted metal than to shiny plastic. The first try came out coarser than we wanted, so it's back for another round. If it makes the cut, you'll read about it here first.
Same price, whichever you pick
Every color is the same material and the same amount of it, so a color never changes the price. Choose on any case's product page, under Case and Lid.
Headcount trays and Bay bins stay one color for now. The limited editions keep their own colorways. That's what makes them limited.