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IT’S IN THE TRUNK!

The perfect car humidor is bulletproof!

Los Angeles, August 20 – Keeping cigars with you in your car seems silly.

But there’s nothing like the smiles you see on the faces of your friends (and those who suddenly want to be) when you bring a box full of cigars to enjoy after lunch or dinner. So I’ve had a special car humidor for about 10 years.

It’s an ammo box.

Yes, you read right. It’s the longtime brainchild of the inventive Lew Rothman, head of giant J-R Cigars of Burlington, North Carolina.

Rothman first offered a 50-caliber ammunition case, lined with Spanish Cedar panels, way back in 1994 for just $20. Virtually airtight, there’s very little need for humidification and even a small sponge is enough to keep cigars moist.

But he didn’t stop there. Soon after, he filled the same box with 105 Honduran-made Belinda grand corona-sized cigars (6 1/4 inches by 45 ring gauge) and it’s still offered (although temporarily out of stock) for $99.95 at his J-R Cigars website. (Subscribers to our CigarWire service have access to pricing on more than 520 brands from eight top national retailers, including J-R).

Or you can have the same type box filled with 91 of his value-priced, Nicaraguan-made La Finca toro-sized cigars (6 1/8 x 50) for just $55.95 (also temporarily out of stock). Maybe . . .

“The last shipment that came into Nicaragua accidentally still had some live ammo and parts from Claymore mines,” wrote Rothman when he granted permission to use the picture of the Belinda box above.

“The truck driver was arrested and kept in jail for over a week until we could get him out. Then the boxes were inventoried and monitored by the Nicaraguan military to make sure they all went out as cigar packaging.” Oh, boy.

Assuming you can get one – or buy an ammo box from a military surplus store – it’s easy to convert the box into a multi-tray humidor. The Belinda and La Finca boxes are already lined in cedar by J-R, so you just need to either plop your cigars into the case, or you can add trays to create a multi-level humidor that can also separate cigars by brand.

I asked a local plastics shop to create the trays for me in clear acrylic with half-inch holes drilled in the bottom to allow for the humidification device to work throughout the box. The original 50-cal ammo box dimensions are just 11 3/4 inches long, 6 1/8 inches wide and 7 1/8 inches in height. I added three trays of 5 inches wide, 8 inches long and 2 inches high for cigars to lie flat on three tiers and a fourth tray of 6 1/4 inches high, 5 inches deep and 2 ½ inches wide for cigars to stand upright.

With a variety of cigars from 46-50 ring gauge in the trays, I can hold from 45-65 cigars in total in the box. Currently, I keep two brands on each of the three horizontal trays, plus two brands in the vertical stand for an eight-brand choice whenever I’m out.

The cigars stay perfectly humidified by including a Humidipak or Humid-eze (available from Famous Smoke Shop) on the top of the box, on top of a cedar sheet.

It’s an obvious pun to say your ammo box humidor will “blow away” your friends, but it also a comfort to be able to have all the cigars you want in the car, safe and sound and ready when you are.

It wasn’t enough for Rothman, though. He wrote that he also had planned to pack a new, powerful cigar in red cardboard shaped like a stick of dynamite! When he took samples of the red tubes to the Dominican Republic to show to the folks at the Tabacalera de Garcia in the Dominican Republic, they were confiscated by Dominican authorities at the airport!

The idea ended there, as Rothman noted, “I thought the chances of [U.S.] customs allowing me to bring in a 40-foot container of cigars wrapped in red cardboard dynamite tubes were slim and none.”

Stick with the ammo box, Lew. It’s a “sure-fire” winner!
~ Rich Perelman

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