OK as most of you who know me I am in the prosess of trying to sell my home and will be living the, mostly, retired life. Once we, my wife and I, sell our house we will be living in our RV. In the summer time we will be living in the New England area[ New Hampshire, Maine] and in the winter we will be living down south, maybe Florida. My question to you guys is this, my work space will be the table that we eat at, so obviously I am going to have VERY limited space to work at,so I will be unpacking a model to build and then repacking it so that we can eat at the table. The finished models will be packed indefinately unless someone wants to see them. What is THE best way to pack models so that they will not be broken or loose parts when traveling all over the country?

Oh man - it's tough but can be done.
I have only read about the process so here's what I recall - this works on models on bases and dioramas.
Take a box about 2" bigger both directions than the base of your model.
Build a # sign kind of cardboard support - 2 horizontal/2vertical cardboard supports.
On the # you cut a notch in it for the model to sit in.
Fill all the space with foam, place the model in and tape it down.
Build some type of vertical support that will old the base down and run from the base up to the top.
Fill it with more foam.
Tape it up
This is kinda loose on detail. Think of a cardboard cacoon inside the overall box.

People double box a lot too.

Hi Wolf leader,
I think IMHO wrapping cotton wool around the most fragile of parts then wrapping them in bubblewrap then in newspaper. Then pack them together in small boxes and mark the boxes with permanent pen may be a way of doing them.
Not the easiest of things to do and I wish you well with the packing and the moving.
Kenny.

Hi there.

I have a few pieces of advice. I moved from Texas to NY, and we stayed in an apartment for a month here until our house was ready. I brought a kit and some figure and gear with me on the journey. My kits built, partially built and unbuilt were in the moving van for a few days, and then moved into a storage locker for a month, then moved into the house. I had one figure lose an arm, and one antenna broke.

For long term storage, find a box that is just bigger than your kit/dio. Use blue tack or tape on the dio/base bottom to hold the piece in place, then use styrofoam wedges to hold the base in place. Tape those in place as much as possible. Once the piece is secure, give it a gentle shake, then more vigorous. You should be able to turn the box upside down without hearing any bad noises. Either you'll break it then, or it'll be OK. Then box the box in another box, with more packing material. For kits without a base (why would anyone ever do that? ), you have to be more creative. I had some armor kits in progress and cut styrofoam blocks into pieces. For a tank chassis, I cut a block of foam high enough to keep the tracks/running gear off the box bottom, and just narrower than the hull width between the tracks. I used tape to hold the foam block on the box bottom, and to hold the chassis on the block. There are a few spots on your armor where there aren't odds and ends that could break (light, antenna, fenders etc). Wedge styrofoam there, and pray. Again, the shake test applied gently at first will help. For a turret, I cut a piece of paper and taped one end to the box bottom. Then I laid it over the turret and taped the other end to the box bottom. Again, you have to do this carefully and try to avoid breaking stuff off. In some cases, just take off the antennae or other things. You can glue them on later. It's better than breaking stuff off!!

For the in progress kits, life is easy until you get some big subassemblies. The average DML box has lots of space. I keep most of my tools in an old metal geometry set case. Choose your most used tools, some sand paper, a sanding stick or two, and get them all in the geometry kit. Then you can keep that in the kit box. I brought along a bottle of glue and some putty, they fit in the box too. It's like minimalist modelling. A #11 blade knife, some tweezers, a sprue nipper/cutter, nailclipper, pencil, small squares of wet dry paper, a couple of needle files and my pin vise all fit in the geometry set box. What more do you need? You can get toothpicks etc anywhere. I also brought a small box separately with some paints (acrylic, no need for solvent then), brushes and such. You don't always paint, so you only need to get that box out when it's painting time. I don't use an airbrush, so no need for that. It does make you work on one kit at a time!!! I built a lot of my DML PzIIIJ that way.

Once you have some big subassemblies, you can pack them in the kit box with paper and tape like you did for the kits in long term storage.
Have fun being a snowbird!
Andy