LawrenceH

Blimey those prices look alarmingly reasonable

You'd definitely have to joint it (as in glue a couple of sheets along the grain). That's normal though and adds stability. As said you could specifically seek out redwood 'furniture board' for this, never had any problems with it myself. But good ply is durable, and looks very nice finger-jointed (or dovetailed. Tufts list 'marine ply' albeit only in 6, 12 or 18mm. Could try calling? 12mm with more bracing is a good route to a lighter but still decent cab. My best stage monitors are 12mm birch with 12" drivers, and they've doubled as excellent bass cabs in the past. I'm sure there are other suppliers, often sheet material suppliers are specialist and distinct from timber merchants.

Be interested to hear these. I've just picked up a bass with the '74s in and I love the bright mid-hi clank, but so far find them a bit lacking on the low E. Does the overwound nature give them a bit of heft down at the bottom?

@Bass Direct I've recently been looking for some lighter tuners to replace the heavy CBS era Fender ones seen on 70s basses and various reissues. I'm not the only person looking for them but looking at alternatives, none of them match the backs but also things like resolites and hipshots have a different shape, smaller clover leaf. Do you know of any? If not do you have the opportunity to feedback to manufacturers/distributors? The existing tuners are among the heaviest available, that plus the chunky neck profiles on a lot of these basses make them particularly prone to dive. It would be great to have an aftermarket solution that kept the look. Anyway thanks for reading!

Interesting - next time I happen to be in the merchants I'll take a pic of the redwood/red deal, which AFAIK is Scots pine same as it always was. Though I suppose Russian supplies have disappeared now so that might have impacted things. The pale white stuff or anything sold for studwork I'd agree is usually awful splintery rubbish, though I did get a batch of treated 3x2 from Selco that was incredibly heavy and dense-grained. Tbh it was a pain for studding out as you couldn't drive screws in without them snapping off, and even piloting them needed a really good sharp bit! Think they might have been pitch pine like many old floorboards, certainly a nice fragrance when cutting. Total waste as studwork.

Phil this doesn't tally with my experience, other than the caveat that you have to select it yourself, but Robbins, Buildbase, Travis in Bristol all carry good enough redwood pine, largely knot free and straight grained, and store it racked indoors. Selco usually have good enough stuff too, and Timbersource carry good enough low knot-count furniture board. For a bass cabinet IMO you're not going to need the flawless quartersawn lengths you would want for a full-size, free-hanging door. It's going to be 21-22mm and I'd wager it's at least as stiff as most 18mm plywood, despite being lighter. Might be worth having a cross-grain brace on each panel I suppose if the panels are deeper, but I can't see any problems with using it for a wee little cab provided the builder knows what he's doing. I wouldn't use it for a heavy gigging cab just because it dents easily but unless you're gigging underwater it's not going to fall apart. I'm not sure what is meant by 'stability' but I've never had problems with splitting, and warping (of free-hanging cupboard doors) has been rare and probably similar to what I've had with plywood where presumably there are occasional manufacturing flaws. In any case a cab constrained by construction method isn't going to move. By contrast the only plywood I can get that is decent is from Sydenhams (or Robbins but they're even more £££), formerly Avon Plywood, and recently I was paying over £100 per sheet for B/BB.

Decent knot-free joinery-grade redwood pine is easily obtained from timber merchants or, tbh, most builders merchants - places like Buildbase and (though I hate their attitude towards small traders) Travis Perkins and Jewsons usually carry very good stuff. Your local independents probably do too, and are more likely to give you a fair price. You can also find good furniture-board. Go for ~21mm thick finished stuff and it ought to be strong yet pretty light. It just dents more easily than oak, beech or birch. It shouldn't split if it has been properly kiln dried and you don't start forcing unpiloted screws in next to cross-cuts.

I've never built cabs from solid timber (though I have built plenty of other stuff), but for a given density/type of timber, solid is actually noticeably stiffer than ply. Weight would depend on the timber species (and individual planks) chosen but ought to be roughly equivalent to the same species as ply. Machine-cut finger joints would look cool IMO. Functionally they'd work very well and no screws necessary. The extra cost in timber is insignificant if jointing solid planks together to make a sheet manually - it only matters if working from standardised sheet material where a design has been tightly optimised to fit the sheet with absolute minimal wastage. Sensible timber choice and splitting shouldn't be an issue, especially when you've got a protective finish on. Plenty of 100+ year old furniture without splits.

Where's that then? I've never seen decent plywood in any of ours. I'd like to find a source that's somewhere between far-eastern poplar-core with loads of voids and super expensive birch from Sydenhams

From a manufacturer's perspective, pickup differences are the easiest and main way for the manufacturer to differentiate cheap/expensive product lines in terms of tonal differences. I swapped out the 'vintage alnico' pickups on a Mexican Classic 70s bass for then-current AV75 pickups and it turned an anaemic, polite instrument into a snarling funky monster. I know I could have got close to that sound another way, but the pickup swap was simple, it's inherent to the bass itself which is useful when going through house/rehearsal rigs, and I enjoy playing that bass a lot more with those pickups in.

Yes I assumed you'd need the low pass side - an optional defeat switch for the tweeter might be an interesting extra. I suppose a 2.5way ideally necessitates a (switchable) extra pole on the low pass filter to smooth out the transition, and I guess that'd normally be an inductor so a bit more cost as it'd need to be low down. I built 2.5way tops with some Deltalite 10s that I deemed unsuitable for bass guitar compared to more robust drivers, it did do that 'girth' thing which bassists chase.

In my experience yoga mat doesn't tend to work as well as foam slabs, it's not thick or firm enough to properly support the weight of heavy cabs through their feet so the decoupling is compromised. I've found foam blocks are much more reliably effective. The cab needs to be properly 'floating'. Spikes can make a bit of a difference with hifi speakers, I suspect because they're placed in the corners of the cab where the panel vibrations tend to be reduced compared to the centre. That doesn't really apply in PA where cabs tend to have feet already.

Not used spikes, but when putting cabs on wooden stages or hollow floors with a propensity to resonate in the upper bass and low mids, I've had very good success using slabs of firm packing-type foam between the speakers and the floor. Audibly and measurably tightens up the bass in those scenarios - the kind of situation where you're otherwise pulling out tons somewhere between 80 and 300Hz on a graphic in an unsatisfactory attempt to control the woolly boom. Edit to add it's also great under stage monitors and often buys more gain before feedback.

Not necessarily, that was a bit of a postcode lottery in any case even by the 80s/90s, and in my case the subsidy (limited to only those who passed an aptitude test) went towards a different instrument.