SOUNDPROOF CNC ENCLOSURE
After a year of owning my CNC machine, I decided it was time to upgrade it's housing. The pictures you see below show the progression from left to right of my CNC housing technology.
At first I just let everything sit on the living room floor and vacuumed around it regularly to keep the mess down. This soon became to much of a chore so I decided to put everything into a cardboard box. In the second picture I accomplished this by tearing apart an old telescope box and putting everything inside. This helped with containing the mess and allowed me to slide the whole thing out of the way when I needed the room.
Eventually I decided I needed a nicer looking cardboard box. So I went to Home Depot and purchased a heavy duty moving box. I made some cuts and modified it to fit my CNC. This is what you see in the 3rd picture. The new box allowed me to make the whole setup much smaller while still offering some degree of containment for the mess.
The last upgrade I made is what you see in the fourth picture below. I build a very large enclosure using 3/4" MDF and rug liner foam to make a soundproof enclosure.
At first I just let everything sit on the living room floor and vacuumed around it regularly to keep the mess down. This soon became to much of a chore so I decided to put everything into a cardboard box. In the second picture I accomplished this by tearing apart an old telescope box and putting everything inside. This helped with containing the mess and allowed me to slide the whole thing out of the way when I needed the room.
Eventually I decided I needed a nicer looking cardboard box. So I went to Home Depot and purchased a heavy duty moving box. I made some cuts and modified it to fit my CNC. This is what you see in the 3rd picture. The new box allowed me to make the whole setup much smaller while still offering some degree of containment for the mess.
The last upgrade I made is what you see in the fourth picture below. I build a very large enclosure using 3/4" MDF and rug liner foam to make a soundproof enclosure.
Unfortunately I don't have many pictures of the whole assembly process, but it was pretty straightforward overall. I built an outer box of 3/4" MDF that was made of 4 walls and 1 floor. I then lined the insides of this outer box with 3/4" rug liner foam. The foam acts as an excellent sound dampener when attached to vibrating surfaces. After lining the insides with foam, I built an inner, smaller box that was designed to slide into the larger box. The idea here was to minimize the hard contacts between the inner box and the outer box, so the foam acts like a spring between two masses.
After the boxes were slid together, I added a lid with a hinge and some more foam to line the inside. I also added some weather stripping to the top edge of the box to form as air-tight a seal as possible with the lid.
After the boxes were slid together, I added a lid with a hinge and some more foam to line the inside. I also added some weather stripping to the top edge of the box to form as air-tight a seal as possible with the lid.
The video you see below is a time lapse of me sliding the two boxes together. Due to the fact that each box weighed about 40 lbs and that it was a very tight fit with the foam lining, it took a considerable amount of energy to seat the inner box. I had to literally jump on the whole box to get them to fit together.
The last thing I did was install some LEDs and a webcam so that I could monitor what was happening inside the box. The LEDs are just a simple strip of white LEDs powered off a 12 V wall plug and the webcam is connected to the same computer running Mach3.
