i've been meaning to do this for a while i've got my a-type speaker that i pulled out of the hot rod
when i swapped out for the cream back so i thought i'd build a guitar cab
to house that speaker and you always need an extra guitar cab right
the
good people over implicit audio sent over their 1x12 guitar cap for me to check out and it's a
really simple build you build it yourself and you customize it yourself it's a great little project
they've also got different types of cabinet available on their website
it's worth checking out but for now let's see what we've got here let's get this built
so let's take a look at what you get in the box there's the frame
and you also get the front you get two sides obviously
a top and a bottom you also get all the hardware as well and that handle is really nice
now one thing i noticed was in the box you get these four extra pieces of wood you are going
to need them i thought they were just packing materials so what i did is i laid it all out
on the floor and then i laid all the screws out and all the hardware and small little piles which
allowed me to then eliminate where things would go so we're tapping in these little screw holders
and they're going to be for the handle eventually and to hold the speaker in place as well
what i pointed out there is you've got two slotted grooves in the wood
one slightly narrower than the other so you just want to make sure that you get all
the narrow slotted grooves all together and it's fairly straightforward to put together
you can use wood glue i just use no more nails or liquid nails to put it together
and it went together really really simply it's almost like building a large piece of lego you
know really really easy and if you do get stuck on the implicit website i was using my phone as
you can see here you can get the instructions and i was just following those on my phone
and they're the extra pieces of wood that you're going to need because i thought they
were packing materials as i said but they're not you are actually going to need them
now i guess it's a good idea if you've got clamps to clamp it i haven't so what i did
is i just laid something heavy on top of the cabinet to keep it all together overnight
and then the last two pieces here are the rear baffle and you've got the piece that holds the
input jack now i wasn't sure whether to add metal or plastic corners because i might tolex
it in the future maybe a seafoam green or a sonic blue type of thing looks really cool
but for now i think a nice dark stain will work perfectly
filmed this part in the garage obviously because this particular stain
has got a smell to it and we've got a couple of cats in the house at the moment
but i chose this walnut stain i've used it before on various projects throughout the
house so i had some of it it goes on really nice and brings out the grain in the wood
you also only really need one coat of this as well and it dries really nice i decided
to go over the entire cabinet but of course in hindsight probably what you should have done or
what i should have done is stained all of the wood first and then put the cabinet together because
otherwise it's just a bit of a pain to try and get in all the little gaps and all the little grooves
really easy process with this stain just dip a rag in and then wipe it on as i say i've had some
really good success with these minwax stains i used them on both of the guitar builds that i did
decided to stain the inside of the cabinet as well because if you look from the back
or if you look at the speaker from the back of the cabinet it's nice that the whole cabinet's stained
and that you don't see any of the birch wood inside it just sort of finishes it off
once it's stained you can then put some of the hardware on so i'm going to put the feet on here
i'm lucky to have the four feet to be fair because the cat found them
and thought they were cat toys he was batting it around the room anyway managed to recover them
from the cat substituted it with a toilet he would like and now i can put the feet on the cabinet
the handle is just screwed on simply and it screws into those screw clamps that we
hammered in earlier really nice quality handle actually it feels really solid
and now is the time to fit the a-type speaker i've had it in my understands cupboard ever since i
swapped it out of the hot rod for the cream back and just here i thought it's not going to go in
i'm going to need to remove one of those baffles but luckily it did and just put those screws in
finger tight as um i had some experience when i swapped the speaker out in the hot rod because if
you put them in finger tight you'll get them all in and you can tighten them afterwards
and here i'm just going to solder the wires for the input jack
nice and easy to fit the input jack it comes with three allen screw bolts they're not quite
torques but they're allen screw bolts and then once that's in of course uh just connect the
speaker wires up clearly marked on the back of the speaker the grill cloth was another choice to make
as there are a ton of options but in the end i want the classic black and silver cloth
from stew mac and it's easily changed in the future if i decide to change it up a bit
they had a whole range of tolex on stew mac's website
and i couldn't decide whether to go for like a classic vox or a tweed
or something more modern you know but then i just looked at my fender rod and i thought ah
silver and black with a dark wood stain that will look fantastic now this stuff is really really
thick because i was also worried that i wouldn't get the framing i was thinking how am i going to
get the frame on do i put it on with magnets do i screw it on or whatever but in the end didn't
need to because this is a really thick material so don't be afraid of pulling it tight if it
was any other fabric then you pull it tight and you're going to get some sort of creasing in it
with this stuff absolutely no problem at all just pull it nice and tight get it stapled on
and i tucked the corners as if i was wrapping a christmas gift that was just the way i did it
and of course once that's on the frame it fitted absolutely perfectly nice and snug so i didn't
have to worry about any fixtures or fittings to make sure that the frame stayed in the cabinet
currently i've got the hageman one water connected to it for a more british mid-range sound
to complement my fender scoop sounding amps and i can switch my pedal board between the two amps
now the only tools i needed were a screwdriver a hammer some wood glue or in my case no more nails
a stapler to fit the grille cloth some speaker wire which i ordered with the spade connectors
already fitted from amazon and a soldering iron and it took me around an hour and a half in total
it was really simple you get the instructions on how to do it from the implicit website
but i started by laying it all out sorting the screws and hardware
into little piles and it just made more sense where everything went that way
i'm so pleased with it the cabinets baltic birch and sounds very resonant it's really reminiscent
of the original hot rod cap to be honest and it's got a nice weight to it 17 and a half pounds
and i can use the a-type speaker whenever i like now that i've got an amp cab
that can use in the future it's going to be a really handy thing to have me running a guitar
youtube channel and all that sort of thing you can also check out the prices at implicitaudio.com as
prices come down recently and you get to make your own custom cab and make it to your spec
it was really easy and a really fun project to be honest and i really enjoyed doing it if you're
thinking of doing it then check out implicit audio and let me know how you get on cheers