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Post up your homemade cabinet and rack/head case concoctions...

#21
skygzr said:
My first bass was a red Epiphone just like the one you had. My first real bass was a Ric 4003, although mine was blue. I too had Peavey cabs.

As far as I know I never met the redhead guitarist, though.
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Nice! (hehe… she went blonde - 10yrs later) ;)

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#25
4-stringB said:
I post this from time to time whenever DIY comes up. 2 fEarful 15Subs, green sparkle drum wrap, all other hardware, including aluminum trim from big box home center, welded by local metal shop. The head case is a direct copy of a vintage Kustom tuck n roll, done in green sparkle, by local automotive upholstery shop. The head case has 3u spaces, and contains a Peavey IPR1600, with DSP. Also has a 31 band Rane EQ. (Pictured is a ADC Parametric EQ) I use a Peavey6 mixer as a pre. This outfit will get far louder than ever needed.View attachment 4394214
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I dig the green drum wrap. Nice looking rig.
 
#26
CaperBass said:
Here is a few of mine...sorry not bass related but has some Fender content:
The old radio / phonograph cabinet was heading to the dump so I got it free. In my jam space I needed something to put my PA and stereo amp in so I took on the challenge. The restored photos make it look shinier than it actual is. I just applied some stain to the worn areas to even out the tone and added some flat polyurethane....plus a lot of gluing and building missing parts.

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The cabinet is based on a Fender Blues Jr amp that I use with a 5 watt tube amp for harmonica. It has a 12 inch Weber speaker.
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The combo amp was built "pretty" as it resides mostly in my leaving room and had to meet wife approval. It has a hand-wired tube amp based on the 1950's Fender Princeton...I use it for blues harp.
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Nice job on the phono cab! Cool blast from the past.
 
#29
staurosjohn said:
WOW… so we were (fairly poor) farmers… literally had access to very limited resources :beaver:
I 'concocted' *this* mess from somewhere… (pls don't let @agedhorse see this :facepalm: :nailbiting: :p)
Stuck 2-15's (no clue re: specs) into a plywood box… put some sort of hi-fi amp into a plywood 'headcase'… found a 'Cordovox' nameplate… need I say more?!? :nailbiting:

This was 1975ish… I was able to, soon thereafter, pick up a '76 RIC & a Peavey (4x15) rig… sounded MUCH better :laugh::D :woot:

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I don't know if you are aware, but Cordovox was a early brand of accordion with an electronic organ built into it. Imagine the ribbing your buddies would have given you, if they knew that fact!
 
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#31
Analogeezer said:
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.

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Sorry, I have no pics to show, but back in the 70's, with a lot of help from my shop teacher (and I mean a lot of help) I managed to build a pair of Altec A-7s..
 
#33
dbsfgyd1 said:
Sorry, I have no pics to show, but back in the 70's, with a lot of help from my shop teacher (and I mean a lot of help) I managed to build a pair of Altec A-7s..
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The first cabinet I built was a single 15" cabinet which I loaded with a Rat Shack speaker. It was made to the dimensions of the Kustom 100 I had at the time so I could "create a stack" (see the first post in my "your first bass amp" thread.

The guy that helped me build it was a good friend of my dad's, they were in the Air Force together and my dad became friends with him in TN, and then we stayed with his family in Seattle when we went to Taiwan.

Cool guy, was a crew chief on C-141 Starlifters.

Later on (circa 1976 or so) he wound up at MacDill in Tampa so my dad reconnected with him; FL is where he helped me build the cabinet.

I was thinking of just cutting out the boards and screwing into them from behind with a frame made of 1 x 1" wood. This guy really went the extra mile, dado'd the front baffle into the entire top/bottom/sides for strength and lack of vibration.

I never took wood or auto shop, not from lack of interest but I had used up my elective for band and jazz band which for me was a higher priority.

Analogeezer
 
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#34
Methaneman said:
Nice job on the phono cab! Cool blast from the past.
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Thanks...it was a lot of work but it was worth it. Tricky part was cutting the front off neatly to make it into a door for access to my newer electronics. A few fake knobs and it looks like it could turn on. A modern sub-woofer fits nicely where the speaker was originally. I have the original amp chassis hanging above it to show off the old technology and the pretty valves (tubes).
 
#36
Analogeezer said:
The first cabinet I built was a single 15" cabinet which I loaded with a Rat Shack speaker. It was made to the dimensions of the Kustom 100 I had at the time so I could "create a stack" (see the first post in my "your first bass amp" thread.

The guy that helped me build it was a good friend of my dad's, they were in the Air Force together and my dad became friends with him in TN, and then we stayed with his family in Seattle when we went to Taiwan.

Cool guy, was a crew chief on C-141 Starlifters.

Later on (circa 1976 or so) he wound up at MacDill in Tampa so my dad reconnected with him; FL is where he helped me build the cabinet.

I was thinking of just cutting out the boards and screwing into them from behind with a frame made of 1 x 1" wood. This guy really went the extra mile, dado'd the front baffle into the entire top/bottom/sides for strength and lack of vibration.

I never took wood or auto shop, not from lack of interest but I had used up my elective for band and jazz band which for me was a higher priority.

Analogeezer
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My dad and I made a 2-15 cab as well with no blue prints of plan. Well, my dad was in the building trades, and…..This thing was made from 3/4" Marine grade plywood glued and screwed a lot (must have used 5 lbs of screws), size wise, 52" x 42" x 18". Covered in vinyl, all exterior angles covered in aluminum angle iron. Totally indestructible. Also unmovable…LOL!!!! We only had a Volkswagen Beetle… duh!!!
 
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