I chose to build the headshell for my new Ballarino amp for myself, despite the fact that I found a very nice place where you can order a headshell customized to your needs. Partly because I became a member in a DIY makerspace which has a very nice CNC router that I wanted to use. A few years ago I did some headshells by hand, which turned out ok, but due to my far-from-perfect abilities regarding wood working the results were not really presentable.
With the CNC router on the hand I could really concentrate on my strengths in planning and constructing the cabinet, and let the machine do the hard and exact work.
I used the free and open source software LibreCAD for drawing the construction plans.
The cabinet will have overall dimensions of 660x230x218 mm, and is cut out from one piece of 15 mm birch plywood measuring 1200x700 mm. The sides are joined by using dovetail joints. The dimensions of the front- and back panels are reduced by 2 mm on all sides for allowing two layers of tolex (headshell + panel) to fit around the panels. Additionally I subtracted 1 mm around the front panel to allow space for the piping.
After drawing the different panels (top, bottom, 2 sides, front plate and back plate) and laying them out in LibreCAD, I imported the DXF vectors into the VCarve Pro software used in my makerspace for generating the g-code for the CNC mill. There is a very handy dovetail extension for the VCarve software which enabled me to cut the dovetail joins with a standard 3 mm end mill, without using special router bits.
Routing of the panels took about one hour, you can see the results here:
