Chris Knight
Established Member
UK Workshop Competition Entry.
Section 1.
27th May 2007
Lee Harrison (Synetc4)
The project is to design and build a unit to contain various pieces of amplifiers and recording equipment. The unit will live in the house and must blend in with the existing furniture.
As well as the aesthetic considerations the unit must also allow adequate
cooling, be strong and not suffer from any vibration when the amplifier is being played. That is to say that the hardware must not vibrate or case buzzing that would be annoying and spoil any recording that will take place.
There will also be provision of a fairly large drawer that unit to contain things such as cables, headphones, a small set of guitar adjustment tools, spare strings etc.
The top of the unit will also have a full out ‘keyboard type shelf that will be used to house a Dell M70 Precision Laptop. This is used for HDD recording and Disk burning. It also allows Playback of Music files over the network from a 300GB Network HDD
One of the mayor design ‘features’ is a roll out rack that will hold the Midi pedal board that will control the effects unit in the cabinet. It is proposed that this will achieved by installing ball bearing draw runners on a vertical ‘shelf’ that when closed will be flush with the side of the unit.
The dimensions of the unit are still open to some tweaking but they are mainly based on the biggest component the Marshall amplifier. This is basically a 20” Cube. As it’s a valve amplifier it produces a lot of heat which needs to escape. Normally this happens through a set of baffles at the back. As the unit is going into a cabinet this will need some assistance. A pair of 40mm Cooling fans will be installed at the back to push air into the valve chamber and draw it out of the back. A special power supply (12v) has been selected due to it’s low electrical noise that is required for this application. The power supply will be fed from the distribution board at the rear of the cabinet, that will also supply power to the various other components of the system.
The Amplifier and 4 track unit will be installed onto ‘sliding shelves’. These will be made using full extension drawer runners which will allow the units to be pulled clear of the main carcas to allow cables to be unplugged and re configured.
Many of the devices in the system have rear jacks that will occasionally required changing for different setups etc. You can see the connection on the rear of the devices above.
The equipment currently resides in various boxes and guitar cases. Every time I want to play I have to plug this lot in.
I started with a few pencil sketches and have tried to make use of sketchup to refine the design.
I also made a list of equipment that the cabinet would have to accommodate and made careful measuremets. The lsit of equipment is as follows
Marshall JCM900 Combo amp
Roland GX700 Processor.
FC200 Midi foot controller
Jim Dunlop Cry Baby Wah pedal.
BOSS HM2 Pedal.
Marantz PM Power amp.
Tascam Portastudio
Creative 20Gb HDD MP3 Player.
Section 1.
27th May 2007
Lee Harrison (Synetc4)
The project is to design and build a unit to contain various pieces of amplifiers and recording equipment. The unit will live in the house and must blend in with the existing furniture.
As well as the aesthetic considerations the unit must also allow adequate
cooling, be strong and not suffer from any vibration when the amplifier is being played. That is to say that the hardware must not vibrate or case buzzing that would be annoying and spoil any recording that will take place.
There will also be provision of a fairly large drawer that unit to contain things such as cables, headphones, a small set of guitar adjustment tools, spare strings etc.
The top of the unit will also have a full out ‘keyboard type shelf that will be used to house a Dell M70 Precision Laptop. This is used for HDD recording and Disk burning. It also allows Playback of Music files over the network from a 300GB Network HDD
One of the mayor design ‘features’ is a roll out rack that will hold the Midi pedal board that will control the effects unit in the cabinet. It is proposed that this will achieved by installing ball bearing draw runners on a vertical ‘shelf’ that when closed will be flush with the side of the unit.
The dimensions of the unit are still open to some tweaking but they are mainly based on the biggest component the Marshall amplifier. This is basically a 20” Cube. As it’s a valve amplifier it produces a lot of heat which needs to escape. Normally this happens through a set of baffles at the back. As the unit is going into a cabinet this will need some assistance. A pair of 40mm Cooling fans will be installed at the back to push air into the valve chamber and draw it out of the back. A special power supply (12v) has been selected due to it’s low electrical noise that is required for this application. The power supply will be fed from the distribution board at the rear of the cabinet, that will also supply power to the various other components of the system.
The Amplifier and 4 track unit will be installed onto ‘sliding shelves’. These will be made using full extension drawer runners which will allow the units to be pulled clear of the main carcas to allow cables to be unplugged and re configured.
Many of the devices in the system have rear jacks that will occasionally required changing for different setups etc. You can see the connection on the rear of the devices above.
The equipment currently resides in various boxes and guitar cases. Every time I want to play I have to plug this lot in.
I started with a few pencil sketches and have tried to make use of sketchup to refine the design.
I also made a list of equipment that the cabinet would have to accommodate and made careful measuremets. The lsit of equipment is as follows
Marshall JCM900 Combo amp
Roland GX700 Processor.
FC200 Midi foot controller
Jim Dunlop Cry Baby Wah pedal.
BOSS HM2 Pedal.
Marantz PM Power amp.
Tascam Portastudio
Creative 20Gb HDD MP3 Player.
