stevie

I believe Phil is making good progress with the cabinet, which will be our starting point, and I'm expecting to see the cab assembly details on here before too long. The 10" driver we'll be using is the Celestion Pulse 10. I gave it an hour of 30Hz sine wave in open air to soften the suspension, but my first efforts at measuring the Thiele Small parameters were thwarted by the cold weather. I've had the driver warming up in the house for a day and will try again later.

Well somebody was bound to comment. You were just the first past the post.😊

😊 Yes, he would.

Thomas Eich says those drivers were engineered to work together.

I have in mind something with more excursion - like the 12CL76, but neither of those B&C drivers will have much bottom end in a 30-litre cab. If you model them, you'll see that they have less than the two Beymas - and Phil was specifically going for a bass-light cab. It depends what your goals are (price, weight, size, output , bass extension), but a 10" system might make more sense in a 30-litre cab. There's also a wider choice of bass guitar drivers available in that size.

It's something of an adventure for us, too, John. When you start a project like this, you can never be 100% sure it will work out. Selecting and modelling components based on spec sheets is one thing, but it can prove trickier in practice. For example, sometimes the technical info supplied by the manufacturers is somewhat optimistic - or plain wrong. I recently received a high-end driver from a prestige manufacturer that had a 6dB half-octave dip in the frequency response that wasn't shown in the datasheet. My experience with Celestion has been that their spec sheets and info are accurate. But we'll see. Another unknown is matching compression drivers and horns. Some combinations simply don't work well together - sometimes even components from the same manufacturer. I chose the driver/horn combination based primarily on cost/value for money- so fingers crossed that it works out. The crossover is probably the biggest unknown. Some driver combinations can be made to work together with very simple crossover circuits, while others need more complex crossovers. As I'm aiming for a very simple crossover here, there's no room for extensive driver tailoring - so we need to start with drivers that are well behaved, which I hope these ones are. However, all will be revealed in due course.

I do hope those last two posts are not going to set the tone for this thread. 😁

I think there are better options for bass guitar than that particular B&C driver, including the more expensive drivers in the B&C range. The main problem, as Phil mentioned, is the lack of excursion due to the short voice coil.

So what's the point, I hear you ask? Well, apart from keeping you busy in whatever spare time you may have, this project will give you the satisfaction of having made something useful with your own fair hands during this awful pandemic - because nothing beats plugging your instrument into a piece of equipment that you've built yourself. Well, not much anyway. The cab we're putting together will be small enough to use for practice at home. It will fit easily under the piano or in a spare corner of a room. And if you'd like it to be really spouse-friendly, paint it white or the same colour as the walls. It's an ideal cab for rehearsals or in your home studio - just paint it matt black and leave it where you plan to use it. No need to keep dragging your usual rig in there. If you'd like to use it on small gigs, paint it with Tuff Cab and fit some corners and feet and a handle. For bigger gigs, build a second one without the tweeter. The cosmetics and external appearance are completely in the hands of the builder. There are lots of options. Phil is building the cab we'll be working on in half-inch plywood, and that's obviously ideal, but I suggest using whatever you have to hand. If you have a sheet of chipboard or MDF in your garage, use that. You'll only need a few tools, which I'd expect most people have at home already. A jigsaw, some woodscrews, wood glue, screwdrivers, a soldering iron. If you haven't got a soldering iron, Lidl were selling one recently for under a tenner and may have some left. You can get one from Toolstation, Halfords, etc. for under ten pounds, too. Everyone should have a soldering iron.

This project was touched upon in another thread. We're designing a bass guitar speaker cab that literally anyone can build. Cabinet assembly is based on Phil's easy-build 12" cab, which some of you have already built. This time, we're going to show you how to build a compact bass cab that you can use at home or for smaller gigs. It uses a 10" driver plus a compression driver and horn. It will be designed to be as easy as possible to build. It will also be surprisingly inexpensive, considering that we're using good quality components. Those of you who built the BC112 Mk3 will know that Celestion were very supportive of the project. They are helping out again by providing engineering samples of the drivers. So, thanks once again to Aiden McFall, Celestion's European sales manager. And they've arrived. Edit: Drawings now added here as requested. Please note that you will need to fit an additional batten vertically between the cutouts for the horn and port. This is not shown in the drawing but proved to be needed after testing. BC 110T v1.2.pdf

I haven't seen any info on the Celestion drivers. Has anyone seen inside these boxes yet?

A bit Marmite then.

Looks like it. It's the NXT range without the tweeters. Vintage-inspired indeed.

Facts are good. Perhaps you'd like to explain how it works.

Is there any particular brand you'd recommend, Chris?

I think they're Sica, who do a wide range of drivers, from cheap and cheerful to very very good. If you need to carry the cab on public transport, one magnet assembly is lighter than two. It's all very theoretical though. You really need to try them out if you're spending that kind of money.

I remember these being brighter than expected (in a good way). Their tension suited me too. I had them on my bass for about five years before I sold it and never felt tempted to change them. Because they last so long, I was never able to compare them with anything else. But I thought they were a good product.

They're great people to deal with, I agree.

It looks like a Celestion BX series. Maybe a BX15 3075, which was a 300W driver. I think Fender fitted them to some of their cabs. Here are the T/S parameters and a cabinet design (not mine): cel_bx153075_dsn-1.pdf

Also following (although nothing to contribute at the moment). Don't you love a good build thread?😊

The port size looks all right. Normally, I'd say go bigger - and you do have the space do do it - but 15W isn't going to overload the port.

John built the first prototype, Luke. Nobody needs 3 cabs (do they?)

I'm also in the middle of some almost-finished design projects, John, but I think it'll do the Basschat community good to "make some sawdust" and build something useful.

I calculated 11 litres - so Phil's graphs won't be that far out. The blue curve is a recipe for one note bass IMO. For a 6" driver, the Fane looks good.