Brandon,
I drew up a box today based on my basic ideas and what we talked about Thursday night, It has slots for 7 cars on each side, The middle section is 9″ wide whick allow for more three car tray for future expansion. I’ve planned it with two four inch trays and one two inch one, but that could be any configuration, 5 two inch high drawers if desired. If the bottom two slots are left empty, that leaves a space 9 inches wide, 4 inches high, and seven inches deep. That would be big enough to hold a controller. That added with the storage in the doors should give plenty of room for spare parts. If a guy was to remove all of the drawers and use slots only for cars, which no one is likely to do, the box would hold 41 1/32 cars. I’ll try to get the basic box cut out and put together tomorrow and post a photo(If I can figure out how, probably Photobucket). Overall dimensions are 17″X15 7/8″X8 1/2″ including 1 1/2 inches for the doors.. Given the shortage of bench space we have, I thought it would be better to go higher ranther than wide.
I did notice something else. I put on my magnifiers and bumped my screen magnificatio up to 150% to see if I could see any construction detail on the boxes on the Internet. I was surprised to find that all of them used only glued butt joints for construction of the main box. That explains how they are able to sell them without having a lot of hours tied up in construction. I suppose it’s sturdy enough as these things aren’t going to be drop-kicked off a truck, but I’m going to use glued dado joints none the less, just to add some durability to the box. Once I get the sw set up, it’s not tat big a deal to cut them all at once.
Cheers