DIY leather cabinet corners

[MakerDP]

If you like the look of Mesa's leather cabinet corners I found this very good writeup on how to make them yourself...

https://www.forum-speakerbuildersupply. ... rs-8212246

Look pretty darn easy!

I have a Cameo CNC cutting machine (same thing as a Cricut)... I may try to cut these out on that.

[M Fowler]

Mikey (ampmike) does leather cab corners on some of his cabinet builds.

Mark

[Bill Moore]

I used to use "carpet screw" nails when trimming my PA cabs (they look like a rack case.) (Most are 1 1/4", but easy enough to cut to length). I bet they would work fine for the corners as well!

[dannieh42]

I loved the look of the leather corners so I put them on the Tweedle-Dee head I built. I wished I had seen that before I did mine. They weren't very hard, but reading that could have saved me some time experimenting. Next time I'll make sure to clean up the unfinished back side of the leather to make the cut edges look a little cleaner. Overall I'm very happy with how they turned out.

[dorrisant]

Thanks for that link! Looks like a great vendor. Gonna have to try it out.

Let us know how the CNC cutting works out. I was thinking of laser cutting them.

[MakerDP]

Nice looking head cab there!

I'm thinking I may try this out. I don't know if I will be able to cut the leather on my cameo... looks easy enough to do without it though. If I were going to do a bucketfull of these I'd probably take the time to figure it out but for one or two cabinets every other year I don't think it's worth the effort.

I am currently tolexing a TRM 3D cabinet in Wine Taurus. I think these leather corners would look really sharp on that cabinet. Of course if it works out well, I will have to do the same for the matching head cabinet.

[MakerDP]

OK so I am in the middle of trying this out and I learned a valuable lesson the hard way right off the bat. I got my pieces cut out ok (by hand) and used the corners I was going to put on my cabinet as the forms per the link I posted. I figured, hey since I have eight of these metal corners then if I leave the leather in them to dry overnight there will be very little chance of them deforming as they dry. Great idea, right?

Well... when I checked on them later that night the forming worked fantastic, but the chemicals used to prep the leather must have had some sort of reaction with the metal or the plating on the corners and there are some dark greenish-blue stains that look like dots on all of my nicely formed corners. Ugh. I am going to go ahead and try and dye them dark brown to see if they get covered-up but I am not holding out much hope. If that doesn't work maybe black will do the job but I'm not sure black is the right color choice for the Wine Taurus tolex.

Oh well... live and learn. Worst-case, I have enough leather to make a 2nd batch of corners (or 3rd if needed) ...

I'm probably going to want to try again regardless because I have dabbled in tooling leather and I wonder how some of that might look on these.

[MakerDP]

Another lesson learned... start light with the leather dye and just work your way up with multiple coats to get the correct color. The Buffalo Brown I used is too dark... almost black... certainly black from an audience-to-stage distance. Not the right choice for Wine Taurus IMO.

Also... I'm not so sure about using those "screw nails." I'm reading that basically the only way to remove them if you ever need to is to destroy the material they are nailed into. Sounds great at first but what if... you know. Not sure what would be best to use here.

Off to make 16 more. I want to do my head to match the speaker cab.

[Bill Moore]

Well, soon I'm about to see if the "screw nails" will come out easily! I decided to turn the enclosure shown above into an EV 3-way enclosure, (18", 10", and horn). Someone used an old Ampeg 412 cab to house them in, and it sure is awkward to move. The old bass bin has casters, and plenty of handles!

[ampmike]

Wow awesome thread,I put them on all my tolex cabs.Been buying them from MBoo for years.Thanks for the info,Mikey