When I first started out playing bass in the Paleozoic era speaker cabinets tended to be expensive, so a lot of people built their own cabinets, especially in the PA bin world.
If you wanted something other than the run of the mill 2 x 15" cabinet and didn't get a SVT or an Acoustic with a folded horn, you tended to wind up building something.
This is the latest picture of the last cabinet I made (in the early 1990's) but it was when 2 x 10" cabs were relatively new (via Hartke) but not that common yet, at least down at the music store.
I was into my amp racks with a bass preamp thing by then and wanted to build a 2 x 10" to use as a biamp cabinet.
I didn't as much design a cab as much as build it LOL. I did pay attention to the EV specs for cabinet volume but the cabinet was made wider so it fit my Acoustic 220 on top without hanging over the edges and also looked appropriate on top of the folded horn cabs I had for lows at the time. In order to hit the appropriate internal volume the cabinet was not as deep as most bass cabinets.
I also figured on using it for some recording work, so I made it a sealed 2 x 10" cabinet and loaded it with EV Force 10" speakers. It worked great for the high end of a biamped rig and ok for guitar but later on I started doing open mics and pickup gigs and started using it for bass with the Acoustic 220 and realized it sounded like @zz.
No bottom end (which up to then had not been a requirement) so I ported the cabinet (with rear tube ports; again I did pay attention to the specs for the speakers) and that helped a lot. Still it did not sound that great for bass and when I went back and looked at the spec sheet for the EV Force 10's, the Fs was really high, like in the 63 Hz range.
So I took out the EV's, and replaced them with Emminence BP102's.....this was around 2000 - 2004 or so.
By then I had stopped using the cabinet on any kind of regular basis but later came back to it for just fooling around with the Acoustic 220 head.
Anyway at the end of it all I wound up with a ~$250 cabinet (counting the cost of the BP102's) that sounds not as good as a factory $300 cabinet but hey I built it myself LOL.
I will say I built the thing to last; all void freeish birch plywood, the front baffle is dado'd into the sides and top (I had a carpenter friend help me construct it), the inner bracing is made of 2 x 2" wood which makes it heavy as hell of course. I think the thing weighs about 55 - 60 pounds.
I resisted putting a tweeter in it because by the time I put in the BP102's I already had some factory built 2 x 10" cabinets with tweeters so I just kept it simple.
Oh yeah because of the guitar thing the cabinet is wired for stereo (8 ohms each side) but with parallel jacks you can just hook one side to the other, or with the Acoustic 220 I just used both speaker outs into each speaker for a four ohm total load.
The speakers actually have grills but I have removed them for coolness factor, they snap on and off the frames that go on the front gaskets of the BP102's.
I have seen some incredible work on "homemade" cabinets here so let's showcase your builder talents then!
Also if you made an enclosure for a head (for example, you had an old head that the enclosue and tolex were dinged to hell so you built one from scratch) those would be cool to see as well.
Analogeezer
p.s. Back in the day people forget but genuine racks were really expensive, you could spend say $250 on an anvil case to rack your $400 Peavey CS-400 so I built a lot of rack cases as well, also I built a rack for my outboard PA/Effects stuff for the same reason.
These days rack cases are cheap as hell, and widely available but way back when you bought an Anvil or a Calzone and they cost tons of money.
If you wanted something other than the run of the mill 2 x 15" cabinet and didn't get a SVT or an Acoustic with a folded horn, you tended to wind up building something.
This is the latest picture of the last cabinet I made (in the early 1990's) but it was when 2 x 10" cabs were relatively new (via Hartke) but not that common yet, at least down at the music store.
I was into my amp racks with a bass preamp thing by then and wanted to build a 2 x 10" to use as a biamp cabinet.
I didn't as much design a cab as much as build it LOL. I did pay attention to the EV specs for cabinet volume but the cabinet was made wider so it fit my Acoustic 220 on top without hanging over the edges and also looked appropriate on top of the folded horn cabs I had for lows at the time. In order to hit the appropriate internal volume the cabinet was not as deep as most bass cabinets.
I also figured on using it for some recording work, so I made it a sealed 2 x 10" cabinet and loaded it with EV Force 10" speakers. It worked great for the high end of a biamped rig and ok for guitar but later on I started doing open mics and pickup gigs and started using it for bass with the Acoustic 220 and realized it sounded like @zz.
No bottom end (which up to then had not been a requirement) so I ported the cabinet (with rear tube ports; again I did pay attention to the specs for the speakers) and that helped a lot. Still it did not sound that great for bass and when I went back and looked at the spec sheet for the EV Force 10's, the Fs was really high, like in the 63 Hz range.
So I took out the EV's, and replaced them with Emminence BP102's.....this was around 2000 - 2004 or so.
By then I had stopped using the cabinet on any kind of regular basis but later came back to it for just fooling around with the Acoustic 220 head.
Anyway at the end of it all I wound up with a ~$250 cabinet (counting the cost of the BP102's) that sounds not as good as a factory $300 cabinet but hey I built it myself LOL.
I will say I built the thing to last; all void freeish birch plywood, the front baffle is dado'd into the sides and top (I had a carpenter friend help me construct it), the inner bracing is made of 2 x 2" wood which makes it heavy as hell of course. I think the thing weighs about 55 - 60 pounds.
I resisted putting a tweeter in it because by the time I put in the BP102's I already had some factory built 2 x 10" cabinets with tweeters so I just kept it simple.
Oh yeah because of the guitar thing the cabinet is wired for stereo (8 ohms each side) but with parallel jacks you can just hook one side to the other, or with the Acoustic 220 I just used both speaker outs into each speaker for a four ohm total load.
The speakers actually have grills but I have removed them for coolness factor, they snap on and off the frames that go on the front gaskets of the BP102's.
I have seen some incredible work on "homemade" cabinets here so let's showcase your builder talents then!
Also if you made an enclosure for a head (for example, you had an old head that the enclosue and tolex were dinged to hell so you built one from scratch) those would be cool to see as well.
Analogeezer
p.s. Back in the day people forget but genuine racks were really expensive, you could spend say $250 on an anvil case to rack your $400 Peavey CS-400 so I built a lot of rack cases as well, also I built a rack for my outboard PA/Effects stuff for the same reason.
These days rack cases are cheap as hell, and widely available but way back when you bought an Anvil or a Calzone and they cost tons of money.
)
