making your own enclosure

[Chico]

Anyone have suggestions, layouts or other design ideas for making effects boxes from sheet material?

I want to start off pretty simple, such as an ordinary, rectangular box.

I will be working with 16 ga. aluminum sheet material.

[Muldoer]

I want to try copying the Electro Harmonix boxes. Theirs are steel I believe, so making some out of aluminum would be cool. Maybe you should try that. They dont look hard to make either.

[Mark Hammer]

PAiA used to use a hybrid of metal and wood for their enclosures.  This simplified the fabrication of the parts, although it sort of complicated the assembly of the box itself.  Still, if you want to experiment with making your own boxes, it is a reasonable strategy to use.

I f you look at the smaller Electro-Harmonix boxes (Big Muff, Dr. Q, Small Stone, etc.), the top half of the box has two bends to it to produce the top surface and front/rear walls.  The lower half of the box has four bends to it to produce the bottom and side walls, in addition to the little lips that fold in and permit you to attach the top and bottom halves.  

For many homebrewers, it is those little "lips" and the extra bends involved that make such boxes harder to make on your own.  On the other hand, if you take PAiA's approach, you can make a pair of wooden side walls that the top half can be screwed into, and simple flat bottom plate can be screwed into the other edge of the side walls (presumably the rubber feet use screws that double as retaining screws for the bottom cover plate.

In some ways, this is more awkward, but you can usually buy preformed, prefinished (or semifinished) slabs of nice hardwood (e.g., 4" x 18", 1/4" thick) at home improvement stores that don't need much additional work beyond a single cut and a bit of sanding.  Ultmately, that may be much less exasperating than trying to bend the metal yourself.

Some may be concerned that this provides incomplete shielding.  In truth high-end stereos used such fabrication techniques for decades, simply sticking a piece of adhesive-back foil on the wooden end-pieces of the chassis and screwing a ground lead into it.

Take a peek at some of the older things over at the paia site (www.paia.com) and maybe that will yield some ideas.

[el_xero]

i also want to copy eh boxes, but i don't know what are the measures... can anyone post the measures of the big muff pi or small stone?

[amz-fx]

Look at the Big Muff size box that I made at:

http://www.muzique.com/projects.htm

I made a Small Stone size as well but there's no pic of it on the page...

regards, Jack

[amz-fx]

I found my notes on the box sizes;

BMP
5.45" wide, 6.75" long.  1.3" high at the front sloping up to 2.2"

SS
3.4" x 5.2" long.  1.35" sloping up to 2.2"

-Jack

[MarkB]

I copied Jack's idea and did a big-muff style enclosure out of wood and diamond-plate aluminum... came out great (haven't PUT anything in it yet, though)..
"-)

[Xlrator]

I made some similar ones with the diamond plate, too. I used a plain sheet of aluminum for the bottoms. Only prob is sometimes the nuts can strip the shaft  if it halfway lands on a diamond.

[el_xero]

I found my notes on the box sizes;

BMP
5.45" wide, 6.75" long.  1.3" high at the front sloping up to 2.2"

SS
3.4" x 5.2" long.  1.35" sloping up to 2.2"

-Jack

:?  isn't that TOO big??

[petemoore]

If you don't have clamps and other proper equipment and experience, I would recommend NOT machining your sharp flat metal pieces...even so, that's why they make stamp presses and cast pieces...
 itzalotta werk to 'CLONE YER OWNE" metal box...I've done it, one good splinter, pinch or slice can be enough to cancel a gig or even substantially diminish the rest of your guitar playing time [would have to be one heck of a splinter!]. Your index fingertip being prime target...!!!
 Thick leather gloves are cheapp...
 A message from your Self appointed Forum Safety Officer !
 My brother taught 'n bought me much early guitar exoerience, he took a good bit of the tip of his left hand off one day, they sewed 'most' .. of it back on...lukki, well took him years of pain and he plays like wind again but, in his words "if you could only kick yorself in the head BEFORE you do the damage!!!"

[Chico]

Folks:

Thanks for sharing your ideas.  Those enclosures look nice.

Jack:  I love your diamond box.  The wood sides appear to be a convenient way to assemble the box easily.  Mark Hammer suggested a similar idea.

Do you cover the wood or otherwise provide shielding to the sides?

Xlrator:
Nice boxes, too.  That metal bottom looks pretty thick.  How did you go about bending and cutting it?

To learn on, I bought a sheet of 3003 grade 0.065 (16 ga.) aluminum.
I first tried to cut it with an air nibbler.  The air tool worked really well, and appears to be a safe way to cut the material, but it was hard to get straight cuts out of it.  I settled on using a 150 tooth finishing circular saw blade.  I clamped a straight edge to the material to use as a guide and got some supprisingly nice cuts.  I just had to go real slow and clean up the  file the edges.  To bend the material, I am using a vice and rubber hammer.

Any good ideas on better ways to bend the material?

Any ideas on a better way to cut the material?