steel buschorns

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hello all ,just stumbled across this forum the other day and thought i might share with you my version of the buschorns, these are 100% 3mm black steel i will put up some high res pics later on ,this was taken on a camera phone while they were being built
 

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Hey this is the way to make speakers! It could hardly be any easier, and no surface issues as with wood/MDF.

Why don't we see more boxes made of steel? What's the drawback?

From where I stand, this could very well mean that I have made my last wooden box, if steel works so well, as it would take a fraction of the effort to make a steel box, compared to making a wooden box.

I see some plasma cutting in my nearest future :D

Magura :)
 
CRS = Cold Rolled Steel.

Why aren't many cabinets made using steel etc? Weight, as mentioned, and, especially, cost. Not just of the materal (that isn't the main problem) but of working with the stuff. Most DIYers and companies are geared up for wood, not metals, even if they have the experience to work with it. There are other details too, but those are mainly excuses.
 
If you've got the facilities, why not? The box would be fiendishly efficient -no panel resonances or wasted energy to speak of.

Only catch to that is that frankly, I don't think the basic design of the Abby cabinet is especially great. Terry was extremely gifted at selecting different materials for their resonant qualities, and I believe Abby was tuned with these in mind rather than it's acutal QW resonant performance / loading, which is a bit mediocre, from what I know of the cabinet. If you remove those carefully chosen materials, you're left with a non-optimal ML TQWT geometry in a very efficient material, which would a) be a bit of a waste, and b) reveal all the limitations of the box proportions. Better to design something from scratch for the material that would be better able to exploit it.
 
A BIB would be my first and second choice. If you've got an extremely efficient material, might as well have a cabinet that has similar priorities and then damp down whatever you don't need. The 166 needs correcting to work properly in a mass-loaded design, which isn't a problem, but if there's an option to use it in a box that doesn't need any in the first place, so much the better.
 
Scottmoose said:

Why aren't many cabinets made using steel etc? Weight, as mentioned, and, especially, cost. Not just of the materal (that isn't the main problem) but of working with the stuff. Most DIYers and companies are geared up for wood, not metals, even if they have the experience to work with it. There are other details too, but those are mainly excuses.

Greets!

FWIW I calc'd some years ago that a CRS cab would be ~1.63x heavier than an equivalent MDF one and the material cost would be ~1.6x less, though if you paid a sheet metal fabricator to shear all the parts to spec and punch any holes it would jack it up quite a bit. This would still be considerably less than building/maintaining a woodworking shop, so overall building from metal would be cheaper since once assembly jigs were built the labor content would be reduced to epoxying the bits together and probably enough to off-set the higher shipping costs and then some. Really, the only reason I can think of for not using it is the lack of cosmetic appeal if you don't cover it in a fancy wood shell, so in the end it's probably best to make a wood cab out of thinner than accepted standard thickness and bond CRS to it using a lossy, non-hardening glue to stiffen/damp/magnetically shield it.

GM
 
Interesting. Cheers (as always!) for that Greg.

Might not even need the fancy wood shell, if the steel was finished right & the industrial look is favoured. Shades of the Modernist movement (just so it doesn't go brutallist -even I have limits ;) ).

A BIB for the 166? Sure. Internals 70in tall, driver 30in down from the sealed end, 9in wide, 12in deep ( + the thickness of the internal baffle material). It shouldn't need any correction.
 
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