This part I might be trying for the first time myself in the next few months.

The ultimate combined use of APD and PB days.

Just need to find a 25hr 4-day trip not on the Thanksgiving/Christmas blackout days.

And I need to find that scheduling worksheet...

You also need to carefully pick the trip depending on how many payback days you have and trip length.

True. I have around a dozen at the moment so I should still have plenty by those months.

I figured a 4-day would be perfect because that's the limit an APD is good for.

Can you convert PB days to IVDs? For the reason to have another way (if out of giving allocated IVDs) to drop a trip with lower reserve requirements.

Short answer is yes. It won't be for this vacation year. Any unused PB days at the end of I think March become Vacation days for next year. Like I said earlier, there is a dedicated document put out by the association on how to maximize the value of the PB days. The very lowest value they have is to be converted to vacation days.

You only need to use the APD on one day of a trip to drop the whole trip

That is generally a smart thing to do if you want to pick up flying after the drop.

Right. In my case though, the plan will be to drop the whole 4-day and use 4 PB days to make it a paid APD drop. So I'll be using the max dropping quantity of an APD of four days.

Or you can find a trip with high block on day one, say Hawaii or Europe or Vegas turn, and then drop that with one PB day, rinse/repeat over and over again till you hit WS credit max. Then you pick up a trip from swap board with high block on day one, drop it with PB day, etc. I had over a dozen PB days last year that I ended up cashing in for an avg value of 6:45.

Yeah I have somewhat employed that strategy in the past as well. But my category doesn't have anything like a 10hr day on day one. Just 6-7 hours is about it, so I'll probably just use 4 PB days to get one good 23hr 4-day dropped with pay. I won't be trying to pickup on the dropped days anyway, it's for traveling.

Problem is, coverage lately isn't reliably adequate at this point to do the strategy you've mentioned.