new speaker cab
I finished a DIY speaker cab for my newish guitar amp a couple weeks back. At first, I had planned on making a fairly standard cab, but a trip to Walmart changed my mind. Speaker cabs, as it turns out, are actually fairly simple to build, though I wouldn’t have believed that during the first part of the build process. I had read online that it’s a good idea to use finger joints to attach the sides of the box together, but after trying it myself, I think it was a huge waste of time. Finger joints look something like this: _|-|_|-| and so on. You then cut the opposite sections out of the piece that will connect together at that edge and glue them. I believe that the idea is that finger joints make the corner more stable–that is, the corner is less likely to collapse. That’s probably true, but using just a jigsaw, it’s pretty much impossible to actually cut the joints right, so you end up with a really crappy looking edge. So, after breaking the jigsaw, my friend and I decided we were just going to use straight cuts and screws. Much easier and much faster. If I ever build another cab, I will probably not bother with finger joints.
After the panels were all put together and I had a box, I needed to create the front and back panels for the speaker and jack. Luckily, I had cut the hole for the speaker before I broke the jigsaw, though, in hindsight, I probably should’ve made the hole a little smaller. It’s the perfect size for the speaker, but the bolt holder things are just on the very edge, so it would’ve been better to give them a little extra space. The front panel was pretty easy to attach to the box–lay out some 1/2″ square pieces to fit as spacers inside the box, then lay the panel on top of those and glue everything together. I didn’t glue the panel in until after I had painted everything. As for the back panel, I started by just gluing it in place, since it didn’t need to hold any weight, but I added some pieces of the 1/2″ square board for support after I started stapling the covering on and the panel came loose. The hole in the back panel was drilled out with one of those doorknob bits for drills.
The covering is where the cab really started to get fun. My friend and I were browsing around fabric stores trying to find something, but fabric stores tend to charge a lot for pretty lame fabrics, so we went to Walmart. Walmart doesn’t have fancy fabrics, but they do have fun fabrics like denim and weird rainbow fabrics, so that’s what I got. I enlisted my mom’s help for the covering, since she’s good with fabrics and I’m not, and I think the end result is pretty good. I have since added a handle and I plan on adding some corner protectors if I can figure out how to get them on (it seems I needed to round the corners a little better).
