soundproofing

[chongnoi]

Moving into a Condo soon and wanting to use one of the bedrooms for training. Does anyone have suggestions as to how to inexpensively and attatractively soundproof a roof for training? Need to keep the noise from the Wooden Man down. Or does anyone have any suggestions for reducing wooden man noise?

[Gluteus Maximus]

Hi Chongnoi. Here's a couple of ideas.

Years ago I had friends who were in a heavy rock band and all lived together in an inner city terrace house (a type of narrow-fronted house joined on each side to their neighbours' houses). They lined the walls of their practice room with egg cartons. It was pretty deafening in that room, but the neighbours never complained! All you need is a few hundred egg cartons (must be the cardboard type, not the plastic ones) and a pot or two of glue.

Another alternative might be to try to stop the source of the sound by gluing felt, thin rubber sheeting or maybe even soft leather either in the holes or on the square cross-sectioned parts of the arms that pass through the dummy. If you glue it into the holes, you may only need some just inside the openings of the holes - experimentation will tell you how much you need.

Max

To know the unseen, you must first learn to see.

[PHILBERT]

chongnoi,

if you choose to use egg cartons, just stop by your local supermarket and ask if they have any cartons they don't need. I use to work in the dairy of a supermarket (and now am a cashier at another one) and when we get broken eggs, we either threw the eggs away (along with the carton), put them in a box and shipped them back to the company for credit, or sent them to the deli for them to use which eggs are ok to put in food. Just stop by the dairy and ask them what they do with broken eggs, if you meet the right man (young teenage male or disgruntled employee) they might hand you the empty egg cartons and just keep the eggs to send over. Now you aren't gonna get a whole lot of them (depends on how many they have lying around), but just try a few super markets.

You might also want to go to a craft store and tell them you need a sound proofing substance. They might be able to find something for you. I found a lot of good stuff at a huge craft store good for martial arts (I found some racks that I can put swords and other weapon training equipment on.) They probably have something to help you with.

PHILBERT

[mun hung]

How about some soundproof board from your local lumberyard? 4'x8' sheet about 12 bucks. Much cheaper than buying all those eggs. :D

[Spark]

The best one, as mentioned, I would say also it Egg Cartons. I think it has to do with the shape of the cartons, a sort of stalagmite (i think thats the right one!) shape - rather than the material.

If you want to go one further, you can use one or two inch this styrofoam sheets that you can most likely get at any large home buildall centre.

As well, foam sheets, with large bumps and grooves work well also. I would suggest combining the styrofoam and either egg cartons or foam sheets with bumps to receive the best results.

[EmptyCup]

Buy more flexible wood for the two horizontal beams that go through the dummy's body. The more flexible the wood used, the more they absorb and consequently, less noise is made. They may "shake" more but at least the sound's not a hard "knock-on-wood" noise as in the more fixed dummys...

my question is how you install the dummy itself in your condo...are there any restrictions on damaging walls? If installed wrong, it could place undue stress on the wall that is shared with the other side :)