Radio boxes have been a critical sore spot for years. A truely watertight box is critical to a reliable ship. Unfortunately, they are not easy to make or keep watertight.

We were curious when someone on the email lists suggested trying an Otterbox in the spring of 2000. The Liberty ship Fond Du Lac was on the ways and was converted to use an Otterbox to house it's receiver and a micro-servo for the throttle. Since then, more and more of our ships have gone this way.

The Otterboxes are not the perfect solution. With a limited range of sizes, they just don't fit in some ships. Keith's Westfalen doesn't have 1/2 an inch of spare space it it anywhere. The HMS Roberts uses the bottom of the hull as the bottom of the radio box and it is still quite short.

Our most recent use of the otterbox is thanks to the e-mail lists. After lamenting the soaking of radios in cruisers during one battle, someone popped up and said that they had just finished getting an Otterbox in their cruiser. HOW? Easy, they threw it under the band saw and cut it down to fit. So why didn't we think of that? Heck, we whack up these beautiful fiberglass hulls, why not these cute plastic boxes? We went forward boldly and took a very small box, cut the bottom out and extended it to twice the orignal height. It's easy to seal the non-moving buldge, and the orignal Otterbox seal and latch remains untouched.

I had a chat with the customer support folks at Otterbox and learned a couple of interesting things. The clear parts of the boxes are polycarbonate, use superglue. The colored parts of the boxes are ABS, use either superglue or ABS pipe cement. They have had problems with the clear latches breaking and the most recent clear boxes I got have black latches.

I bought one of the all black boxes from our local G.I. Joes. The others have come from on-line sources. See the Links page for my current on-line source. I would keep an eye out at sports and marine supply type stores if you are looking for one. Otterbox has a nice website that lists all of their products.

Pelican and other manufacturers have been extending their product lines either up or down. The result is that there are more commercially built boxes that are posibilities for use as radio boxes! Be careful - Pelican's latest boxes feature pressure relief holes. Not exactly what we want.

My latest find is a much smaller microwaveable box found in the large sporting goods store's camping section.