Adventures in PL Premium

So, I have the bulk of the gluing done. I have a bead around all the inside edges, and I've glued in all the primary braces. There are four front-to-back, two side-to-side, and two top-to-back. The top panel is going to be partially braced by the shelf port assembly.
Hopefully this amount of bracing will be sufficient to prevent resonating panels. We'll find out after the glue cures, and I wouldn't be surprised to find I need a couple more on the bottom, top, and shelf panels.
PL Premium is the go-to adhesive for speaker cabinets, as it expands while it cures to form air tight seals. It is fairly nasty stuff though; the tube says it's okay for indoor use, but the offgassing is fairly odorous so I can't imagine it being used in anything besides original construction. All the braces are screwed also, so as long add it does a reasonable job, this thing'll be rock solid.

Peavey cab bracing

Busy day! I got 2 of the 3 dimensions braced, and got the cutout for the jack cup done.
The braces are going to be screwed and glued. I cut little Xs in the tolex before I drilled pilot holes, and I'm going to counter-sink the screws a bit so I cab glue the tolex back over the screw head. It won't be seamless, but it'll look better than screw heads sticking out.
Still trying to figure out how I want to mount the shelf port, and I cut the back panel 1/16" too tall, so I'll shave that down.
Gluing day is going to be a real treat; I've got to place the braces in a certain order or they block each other from fitting, and some of them are so tight they have to be hammered into place. Fortunately there's some working time with PL premium.
Can't wait to hear this thing!

Peavey cab update

I got the big panels taken out of the divider (why did they use OSB for the baffle and back but ply for the divider?!) and "Swiss cheesed" the material I couldn't rout out.
I don't think I'll drill holes through the other braces unless I get really bored. To be clear, this does have a purpose: not only am I removing weight from the cab, but I'm also increasing the volume of air available inside the cabinet. The front-to-back internal dimension is actually only 9 5/16", so without any bracing or the speaker I only have a maximum of 2.9 cu. ft. to work with. Cutting big holes is obviously great, but cutting 3/8" jokes in 3/4" square braces? Probably not so much.
Also, not going to lie, six year old me was really happy doing this.
I have most of the braces cut already, so the next step is screwing and gluing them in place. Not really looking forward to trying to tune the shelf port. It's so big that the length calculations are fairly insensitive to minor variations, so hopefully it won't be too bad.

Peavey Bass Cab Conversion

This is a Peavey tnt Combo, a bass combo amp that put out 50W. The amp part is long gone, but I got the cab for a whopping $15. It has separate chambers for the amp and the "ported" speaker enclosure.

The existing speaker enclosure part is only about 1.8 cu. ft. thanks in part to the shallow construction (10" internally, front-to-back) but also to the section reserved for the amp (4" of height!). The overall maximum internal volume is roughly 3 cu. ft., which is a great starting point. I'm going to brace the hell out of this cab and use the existing front slot for a shelf port. I'm assuming/hoping for roughly 2.5 cu. ft. after installing the speaker, all the bracing, the volume taken up by the port.

The baffle is actually OSB (chipboard) so it might make sense to just replace it, but I'm going to try to avoid that for now. It's dadoed into place, but actually rattling so hopefully a bead of adhesive and possibly some cleats will fix that.

I've been having fun in WinISD trying to find a decent (and cheap) driver for this box. I've finally settled on the Dayton Audio PA380-8, which is (thermally) rated to 500W. I'm going to tune the cab to 50 Hz, which looks life an optimal point for balancing low-end extension and excursion. I'll add the plots from WinISD when I get a chance.

50 Hz is on the high end of bass guitar cab tuning, but a lot of commercial cabs are actually tuned about here. While a low E string is around 40Hz (and the B below that roughly 30Hz), not much of that fundamental is picked up by, well, the pickups. By far, the more important frequency to worry about is the second harmonic (first octave), which will be 80 (or 60) Hz. If you'd like to see evidence of this, search the TalkBass forums for "waterfall plots", which show frequency spectrum content over time in a lovely 3D format.

Anyway, even with the cab tuned to 50 Hz, the driver I've chosen hits -3dB around 50Hz, so even the low B should be quite loud. As much as I wish I were making a subwoofer, I'm not, so I don't need to worry about covering that range.

Plus my other bass cab is tuned to 45 Hz. That one's a real treat, an Eden Nemesis 212 that I fitted with MCM drivers. That cab requires a great deal of bracing as it can shake roughly 100 pounds of other amps and cabs to the floor. Not that I've let it, but objects that size and mass being turned into that old electronic vibrating football game, well, that's just a massive waste of energy.

But back to this Peavey: I've got to seal the back where the amp used to be, cut out the internal "top" that separated the amp from the cab, brace the living daylights out of it, verify the tuning, and then line the inside.

Total cost so far:
Cab- $15
Baltic birch- $35
Driver- $75
Jackplate- $5

Still need to buy: adhesive, lining, screws, paint, etc.

Trace Elliot Love

I scooped up this Trace Elliot AH500X about a month ago. It is... Fantastic. It was the top of the Trace line back in the 80s, and it boasts a pair of 250W into 4 ohm power amps, for a bowel-shaking 500W at 2 ohms.
There's talk of "Trace watts" because these seem louder than similarly-rated amps, but perhaps the better description is "honest watts" as from what I've read, they do spec as advertised. Maybe it's just that they require you to use more cabs to get the full power output.
Starting at the beginning: active and passive inputs. Sure. The preamp gain control has three lights: a yellow "OK" light in the center, a green arrow telling you to turn up, and a red arrow warning you of clipping. Really nice touch.
Then it's got a 12-band graphic EQ, which is defeatable. Very nice to have 30 and 40 Hz to cut. It also has an EQ preset, which gives a nice mid scoop sound. Both of these are foot switchable, and while a mid scoop isn't the best idea for a regular tone, I can see it being useful for occasional accents. There's also a defeatable noise gate which I haven't really tested thoroughly but is certainly unintrusive.
Then there's an effects loop, a transformer-isolated DI out, and a master volume. As they mention in the owner's manual, Trace Elliot expects the user to set the preamp for maximum gain and use the master for overall volume level.
In addition to the effects loop, there's an additional (parallel) power amp in and out.

The back panel is where things get nuts.


So two power amps, each has its own volume control. It seems silly, having volume controls after the master, but it's actually very useful.
Each power amp also has a line level effects loop, which can, of course, also be used as line out and line in. The power amps also can be configured for dual mono, stereo, or biamping with a crossover that's adjustable from 250
Hz to 1 kHz.
Which is pretty crazy as far as versatility goes.


Plus there's a freaking blacklight!
It weighs in the ballpark of 60 pounds, apparently 30 of those pounds are 25 years of dust, and I really wish
I could've afforded those 1818X cabs.

I'm still learning how to tweak this thing, but biamping with the highs sent to a guitar cab is fantastic. I've also been researching bass cab design, which is another whole ball of wax, albeit fascinating.
If my winisd skills are any good at all,
I'll be posting about a couple cabs
I'm fitting with mcm drivers, bracing, and
(re)dampening.

I may even have to put the Matange project on hold, in favor of more live gear.
Still flipping the coin on that one.