Cabinet design – pre-tensioning panels.

[quickshift]

I haven’t read anything about anyone doing this, I don’t know if it’s a good idea…

Anyway, what I’m wondering is whether pre-tensioning cabinet panels would have any beneficial effect on stiffness.

This is where I got the idea, aluminium beam frames on motorcycles are welded under tension to give additional resistance to flex under stress. If for arguments sake, bracing inside a cabinet was very slightly too wide, say 1mm or 2mm too wide, thereby requiring the sides or back of the cabinet to be forced into place; the sides of the cabinet would be under tension so should have additional resistance to flex because of the tension shouldn’t they?

The sides could be secured using threaded bars which ran between the tops and bottoms of the stressed panels.

Bad idea? Daft? Possibly beneficial?

[Cordraconis]

Check out my Ambiorix thread in the subwoofer forum. I used (well, HAD to use ) more than double your proposed tension to overcome my 7mm glueing fault.

So it has been done before, and it is possible to make (at least I hope tomorrow morning!), but this is my first sub and so I can't compare it to everything.

I think that the more tension you put in a string, the higher the freq , so depending on sub or normal speakerdesign, this can be a desireable or bad property to aim for. (Try to get resonances out of your bandwidth.)

[quickshift]

Interesting.

Well saved BTW. I like the slightly unusual weighting system you used.

I think I'll make a test cabinet to see what effect tensioning the panels has.