In the 2015 to 2019 or so timeframe, there was a flurry of activity on making sound-proofing enclosures for Nomads. When I was using my Nomad Classic, I never thought the sound was that bad. But I ran it in a dedicated room in the house we owned.
Now I am in a small, acoustically-live apartment and have a new Nomad on order. I am wondering in advance about the desirability or need of making an enclosure for it.
Is the 5-year lack of discussion on Nomad enclosures an indication that they are a lot quieter lately, or noone in apartments use them any more, or people just accepting the status quo?
There was a recent video of a person in a situation similar to yours — I believe it was posted to Reddit, either in /r/hobbycnc or /r/shapeoko… and there are posts here more recent than 5 years…
Hearing damage is cumulative and irreversible, so I quite agree w/ keeping things quiet.
The biggest bang for the buck on quieting things is to decouple the machine from the floor (and don’t let it touch the walls) — say a foam sheet and vibration isolating pads
Thank you, Will. I forgot about the “wacky” enclosure threads–safes and unused freezers!
I have been wondering about making an actual enclosure versus looking for cheap sound-absorbing wall treatments. Even my phone on speakerphone echoes in the room. I have limited internet connectivity (no Google, Reddit, groups.io etc.) for now, but remember reading somewhere about people making “pads” of layered cheap beach towels etc. to hang on the walls, much less the acoustic foam pyramid sheets. And I remember reading here about someone using cheap moving blankets as sound-absorbing surfaces. An aspect is that any construction effort itself needs to take place in the apartment so foam pads and tacking up moving blankets etc. is definitely more realistic than carpentry…
I think it largely depends on what you plan on cutting.
Cutting metal is so much louder than wood/plastic but it’s easier to deal with chips and such so enclosure considerations are definitely different.
It’s also a matter of time, meaning that my nomad will spin at 24,000rpm but cutting at that rpm has a significant impact on the perceived loudness compared to just cutting more slowly at say 12,000rpm.
If you’ve got time to spare, you can quiet things down more easily.
Luckily the relatively high rpm also makes for a relatively high frequency. That makes dampening much easier. Unfortunately these higher frequencies also tend to be much more annoying if/when they do hit your ears.
If you want to throw some ideas of what you want to cut in this thread I’ll try and get some feedback on different noise levels and what kind of treatments might work out. I’m about two weeks away from moving my nomad 3 into a dedicated little office and it’ll definitely be getting some sort of silent treatment when that happens. I’ve been designing a very quiet, but very expensive enclosure but I wouldn’t mind doing something minimal in the meantime
(Moving blankets do a great job, I’ve got some wrapped around acoustic fiber board currently and it is surprisingly effective given its low cost and complexity)
For what it’s worth, I spent a few years in a studio in New York City that was literally just poured concrete. Walls, floor, ceiling, all concrete and it was some 20 floors up so the windows were reflecting all that sound back as well.
Love, hate relationship with that room…you could do whatever you wanted and the damn thing was indestructible. On the flip side, you could clap and hear the reverb for aaages.
That is to say I’ve got some experience with what I would consider exceptionally live acoustic environments, so I’m hopeful that experience is worth something here
Thank you, Tyler. The kind of things I was machining were from brass/nickel silver Nomad and Bronze? - #7 by Randy, PCB Model railroad track base, and now that I don’t have the Tormach any more, wheels like https://www.cnczone.com/forums/tormach-personal-cnc-mill/77867-distance-rings-post608383.html#post608383 also from nickel silver. Also aluminum, plastics (acrylic, acetal, a little PEEK), small pieces with small cutters generally-- 1/16" would be a large roughing cutter… And at work I’ve recently discovered 416 free-machining stainless steel and am interested in giving it a try, and I have a small sheet of 2mm-thick phosphor bronze that would make really nice N-scale steam locomotive frame pieces if I can machine it too…
Thank you, Phil. Speaker spikes–who’d of thought? (well, given the circumstance, Tyler! ) I had always thought they were to actually couple the speakers directly to the underlying floor structure, bypassing carpet and padding.
Tyler, did you put divots in the Nomad frame for the cone points, or just hammer it down onto them to keep it from shifting? [ducking and running] I’m also a big fan of kinematic mountings, dealing with optics in a lot of products at work.
I have my Nomad in a slightly different enclosure (I hated all of the rattling that the bottom panel created)
So my enclosure has enough wood on the bottom for some threaded brass inserts. The spikes are threaded into the inserts and they sit in the little steel cups that the kit comes with.
Within the next week I’ll have my own dedicated office again so I’ll be able to do that testing we’re interested in. Going to do decibel readings but I’m also going to capture the waveforms with high fidelity to see how different materials/construction methods impact the overall sound.
And finally, I have a refrigerator to test! We got a new fridge over Memorial Day so the old one is a shop fridge. Surely all that insulation and air tight enclosure will be great at sound dampening…just add mass in the form of acoustic glue and mlv? We’ll see
) I had always thought they were to actually couple the speakers directly to the underlying floor structure, bypassing carpet and padding.