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.
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.
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.
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.