So on December 21st 2012 the world was supposed to end according to the Mayans.  Why else would someone have 2,000 years worth of calendar planned out?  Maybe they were just thinking ahead?  Maybe there was a troublemaker that need be punished and so they made this one student write out the entire calendar and December 21, 2012 was as far as he/she got.  Who knows what kind of stock or faith the rest of the world put into the belief that the world was going to end on 12.21.12.  Sure enough though like Y2K stashes before it, the preparations have gone unnecessary.  Sure enough the world spins on.  I bet quite a few people out there decided they couldn’t just have their end of the world supplies sitting on shelves, but they needed military grade hard cases to protect their stuff.  In this particular example SKB Hard Cases would be used, to which I then beg the question; how tough are these cases?

Roberts camera actually was the one who asked me this question (and provided the case), and I should of course mention that I buy all my toys there.  I also should mention that I couldn’t do this job without the help of my buddy brad, who if you watch the following video was in fact the cause for the cases demise……

Ok so anything past this point is probably a spoiler to the video.  We tried to put the case through a lot of reasonably normal tests, and eventually found out that it had been made of a more brittle material than it’s Pelican Counterparts.  Brittle material is ok, except that it was more prone to cracking which we found out after the first test.  We had originally intended to tie a rope to the case and drop it out of brad’s BMW X5 while dragging it for at least a mile.  The problem was that after we dropped it, it slid off the side of the road, hit a rock, snapped the cable, cracked the case and completely separated a latch from the case.  All in less than 30 or so seconds.  While we weren’t discouraged, we also knew that our testing needed to be fair so using something like a table saw or drill would be absolutely out of the question.  Eventually after about 2 hours we had determined that if we really wanted to hurt the case; we could do so without those things despite our humorous use of the Crossbow, and wax loaded .45 Long cartridges. This is not to say that the case wasn’t still standing when done.  It needed a two new latches, needed to be re-sealed, needed a new water seal between the lid and the bottom, and various other repairs; which frankly was a bit much for two hours of being tossed around.

The real problem is that while the case did stand up to most of what we put it though, it was obvious that in the long run of abuse it wouldn’t.  Unfortunately I haven’t done these tests with a Pelican brand hard case competitor to know the comparison, not to mention the fact that Brad did fling the case at one point while it was open, which undoubtedly did more damage than it would have if closed; but be careful what hard cases you buy as honestly you never know what your case actually will stand up to.  I own several pelican cases and have been very happy with them; but I’d venture to guess none of them have ever gone through what we put this SKB case through.  Would this case have held up against the Mayan Apocolypse?  Technically I guess it did; but if there had been any more fire and brimstone my bet would have been with the Mayans.  More Soon.