Seismic Speaker Cab Becomes Cab For Laney Tube Combo

Seismic Speaker Cab Becomes Cab For Laney Tube Combo

Laney Cub 12R gets a new home

conversion done

Ever since I found out the Laney was basically made of cardboard (read about it here) it’s been buggin the shit out of me. So I fixed it. It would take too long to build a custom amp cab from scratch so I decided to convert an existing one to fit the Laney. And I found a perfect cab to use: Seismic Luke-1x12TR. These are solid built cabs made from 1/2″ birch plywood. It was too deep for an amp cab so I reduced the depth by 6″ and it was as close to perfect as you can get. I was originally going to keep the factory orange Tolex but in the process of peeling it back to make the cuts it got a bit stretchy from the heat gun so it was all goofy looking. No problem. I had some snakeskin left from the Laney recover and removing the rest from the Laney was a breeze since the thing was cardboard it just pulled right off. After some clever cutting and fitting it was done. It turned out to be a little heavier than the original by about 2 pounds and it feels rock solid. The original Laney steel mesh back was a tricky fit because of the angled offset around the power cord and extension speaker jack, but I got it in there with a solid panel on the lower half and about 4″ of mesh above that. And I managed to keep my transformer cooling fans undisturbed. I rear-loaded the Celestion V-Type and I love it! I still have some fitting to do on the solid half panel but it’s minor. Now when I look at it I don’t see a cardboard shoe box, instead I see an honest to goodness for real amplifier. The thing is that it never sounded bad, in fact it sounded awesome but it sounds even better now. Warmer and fuller. But just knowing what was under the tolex created a mental thing that I just couldn’t get past no matter how hard I tried. The new box stands a little taller too and it just looks good. Actually the Seismic came with a Celestion G12L which I might use in the Laney amp cab as an extension speaker, I’m just not sure if the cardboard thing will bother me in that application too. We’ll see. All in all it was $80 and two days well spent.