the build process

Ever wondered why so many amp heads, combos and speaker cabinets from the fifties and sixties sound so great and are still around today?

A couple of reasons are the materials and craftsmanship that went into creating them. At Stagecraft we still build cabinets the same way today.

Jack and Elite cabinets are built with all Baltic birch. This material is very dense and strong. It’s classed as void free, which means that unlike lower grade wood it has no ‘voids’ or holes in the internal layers. Voids are a real issue for speaker cabinets as they not only make the material less strong, but they impact the tone causing unwanted resonances and unpredictable frequency response. Our birch stock is very consistent so every new Stagecraft Jack or Elite cabinet will look and sound just as good as the ones before it.

West Coast cabinets are built with solid pine. Pine can be quite variable and much of the commercially available material is not ideal for audio use. So our wood shop manager travels to the yard and hand picks every last piece of pine stock to make sure it will be perfect for a great sounding cabinet.

Cabinet shells are all finger jointed which makes for an extremely strong and long lasting product. As with so many things, they don’t make finger jointing machines like they used to. We still use the same style of machine used to make many of the highest quality cabinets of the past. Ours was built in the 1930’s! We can no longer gets parts for it so we have to have spares fabricated from scratch. It’s worth it though because we can guarantee that that your Stagecraft cabinet is built just like it should be.

We follow the same tried and true path when it comes to covering. Potdevin first started making gluing machines in 1893 and they are still owned by the same family over 120 years later! Their timeless machines remain the best way to perfectly glue Tolex to wood and so that’s what we use to ensure your cabinet will continue to look perfect decades into the future.

Building cabinets this way takes some time and we quote four weeks typical build time although we often complete them earlier. Once your order is ready we’ll send photos of your cabinets so you can check everything out and make sure it is just what you expected before we ship it to you. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it for you.