How I built my Cabinet - Part 1

First, an apology... I was intending to take photos of my cab build throughout the process, but got so carried away with actually making it that I forgot to take photos on a regular basis. To try to make things clearer I've drawn some illustrations.

Second, I am not a carpenter or anything like that so this is not intended as a "How to" but more a "How I did". Feel free to use this as the basis of your own designs for making a cab if you like, but do not rely on this as a good design per se.

My amp won't be gigged very hard and I've never built anything like this before so I wasn't sure how well it would work out, so I  decided to build my cab out of MDF because it's easier to work with than plywood. If I was going to start again from scratch, I would use some MDF for added strength.

First I cut out the following shapes for the main body of the cab:

I then glued and screwed the panels together using 20mm x 20mm lengths of wood to strengthen the corners, so that the end result was a frame something like this, with the panels attached to it:

 and around the ventilation holes and finally sprayed the entire thing with black paint so that any wood that is left showing after being covered with amp carpet will not show up too much.

The following photos (apologies for the quality) show the end result of the main chassis.

Once everything was dry, I filled the tops of the screws with filler (I had counter sunk some of them a little too much) to prevent anything showing through the carpet once it was applied. Next I covered the whole thing with amp carpet and added a handle to the top (going through one of the 20mm x 20mm pieces of wood since when being carried, the whole weight of the amp will be going through the 2 connecting screws!). Finally I staple gunned some mesh behind the ventilation holes and screwed some feet into the bottom.

And that's the main chassis done! :)

Problems... Fixed!

A couple of weeks ago I checked the continuity and connections in my amp to look for dry-joints and didn't find anything. Yesterday I spent a bit more time "chop-sticking" each component and I discovered the problem!

In the end, it all turned out to be because of a dodgy earth connection which I had previously missed. This made me feel kinda stupid for missing it earlier and also very lucky that I hadn't electrocuted myself or someone else... it's definitely a lesson for me to check and double check such important safety connections!