Soul Tramp Cabinet Blog

I’d like to share some of the thought processes and effort that goes into the design and construction of a custom head cabinet.  A blog page seems the best way to do so as it provides interactive participation.

2 Comments on “Soul Tramp Cabinet Blog

  1. Zebra Wood Head Cabinet

    This is the project I’m most excited about. A head cabinet made of zebra wood with a bubinga front panel. The zebra wood is the plank on the right. The paduak and mahogany planks will be discussed in other posts. The zebra wood plank was a special order from Rockler and cost $200. I had to special the board as it had to have a raw width of 12″. I didn’t want to join two boards to get the width required for my cabs. It wouldn’t have been as attractive. Much like the Les Paul argument as to one-piece or two-piece guitar bodies.

  2. The zebra wood board has been planned to 5/8″ thickness, and the bubinga to 1/2″. The bubinga needs to be a bit thinner to as it’s the front panel. This cabinet is 1/8″ narrower in width than the standard Soul Tramp cab. The standard cab has to leave a bit more room on the inside width to allow for the tweed/tolex to wrap around, and still have room for the chassis to slid in. Since this cab has no tweed/tolex covering it needs to be a bit narrower so there won’t be an ugly gap on each side of the faceplate.

    The cabinet is formed with Half-blind dovetail joints.

    The next steps are to install the front and rear panel braces, and to router the round-over on all of the edges.

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