Case or gig bag?

[Jim MacDaniel]

Gator GL here, which works for my needs quite well -- but I suspect I might feel differently if I owned more expensive mandolins than I do.

[mandroid]

I get good use out of the Eastman FG case I got from Jim.

[John Flynn]

People shouldn't get too puffed up about the protection of cases, BTW. A well-known 'zouk player who posts here sometimes (but I will let him speak for himself if he wants to) told me at a workshop that the most damage he ever had done to an instrument was inside a Calton case. The deal was that an airline he was traveling on, to a gig, looked at the Calton, decided it was too big and too heavy for the overhead and made him check it. The Calton arrived in fine shape, but the instrument was broken on the inside. Took him a long, long time to get any settlement on it, too. Now he only does air travel with his instrument in a gig bag. They always let him carry it on. I have noticed a lot of electric guitar players carrying their axes in gig bags in airports, probably the same idea.

[mandroid]

Pegasus, it seems, cures a lot of Calton's shortcomings,..
but, now back to your regularly scheduled programming ..

[Santiago]

Acoustic Mandolin, Hard-shell case; Solid-body electric mandolin, Gig bag.

[Ed Goist]

Acoustic Mandolin, Hard-shell case; Solid-body electric mandolin, Gig bag.

This is generally my way of thinking also.
Here are the cases I'm using now (I should preface this list by saying that I don't play out, and I rarely play my instruments outside of my home):
Highland Strings 2-Point ---> Travelite
Girouard AOH ---> The Protec Stonewood Mandolin Case with Window (I lovingly call this the "sarcophagus case")
Weber Hyalite OM ---> Weber hard-shell case
c.1900 Brandt Bowlback ---> Ridiculously flimsy original leather "clown shoe case" (needless to say this one never leaves the house)
Ryder EM-44 (solid-bodied electric) [on its way!] ---> Will arrive with no case. Still evaluating options...Leading candidate? The Warwick RockBag Mandolin.

Has anyone used the Warwick RockBag? I've heard some good things about it, with some folks rating it as high as some hard-shell options.

[Jim MacDaniel]

I get good use out of the Eastman FG case I got from Jim.

Yeah, that's a good case (sometimes I wish I still had it )

[mandroid]

stick my CF Mix in the fiber glass case, so they're both catalyzed resins and mineral-fiber cloth, basically..

[Jim MacDaniel]

Synchronicity

[John Balog]

Thanks for all the opinions folks, decided to go with a Travelite.