Well My wife wants me around the house more so she sprung for having a shaping room in the garage.{i feel like im regressing from factory shaper to garage shaper}
However we have 2 kids and id like to be able to shape late. Any Ideas on muting the sound, they are using 5/8ths drywall.
I have a skil and a hitachi to give you an idea on the noise.
Soundproofing is 99% about making it airtight. If the room is drywalled with
5/8", I’d check all the seams between pieces of drywall to seal them, similar on the ceiling and floor and door.
you’d be amazed how much this muffles the sound.
The least expensive method I use for soundproofing is to use R-11 batte insulation between the studs before you hang the drywall. Don’t use the soundproof panels; they are pretty expensive, and I don’t believe the difference in soundproofing is worth the $$ you have to pay for them. Also, if your shaping room is going to be pretty large, you may want to hire an insulation company to hang the R-11 for you, and if your shaping room is going to be heated and cooled, spend the $$ for R-38 to be blown into the attic. The insulation company does so much business, strictly installing insulation, that their cost for labor and material is more than likely cheaper than you are going to pay for buying the insulation at retail prices at Home Depot or Lowes. That’s why I stopped hanging my own insulation. BTW, I’m a general contractor, so I do this type of thing all of the time.
Oops, I made a small mistake. Use the R-11 on the interior walls, but use R-13 on the exterior walls, or you just may want to go ahead and use R-13 all the walls.
A couple of tricks-
Use two sets of 2x4 wall studs, staggered in a 2x6 overall thickness wall, with the inside sheetrock fastened to one set and the outside sheetrock fastened to the other, fiberglass insulation in there, so that you get as little conduction as possible.
Either hollow core doors with a little insulating/spray foam inside them or make your own.
Lay insulating foam board over the ceiling joists, to minimise sound conduction. Here in the northeast, we use what’s called strapping - 1x3 spruce - nailed to the ceiling joists 16" on center perpendicular to the run of the ceiling joists, then the ceiling sheetrock fastens to that, which cuts down on sound transmission considerably. Walls not parallell to the strapping nail to the strapping at the top, walls that are either get a piece of fenceboard (1x spruce board) or several pieces of strapping laid together. 16" on center isn’t carved in stone - you can narrow that up if you’re going with an acoustical tile ceiling rather than a sheetrock ceiling.
Cheap carpet on the floor - or a healthy dust accumulation - to prevent sound reflection. This will also be kinder to your feet and back over time rather than the concrete garage floor. I’d go the extra buck a square foot for the carpet underlayment foam, as an extra back and foot saver.
Illustration below - I’ve left out insulation and sheetrock to show just the framing details
hope that’s of some use. One of these days I may actually get around to something like that for myself…
doc…
thanks for the ideas guys
I like Doc’s idea. You need to frame a double wall w/ an air space in between, otherwise you are basically making a drum by screwing the drywall to the studs. Another way is to use a raised metal strap(forgot the name) in between the drywall and wood framing to create a small air space. Both methods are using multiple changes in density to break down the sound waves.
In a recent shop move a couple of years ago, my old shop partner move into a 2000 sq.’ building w/ Mr. Yater. In dividing the building in half, they framed the double wall w/ an air space in the middle. With large thickness planners and shapers running in the cabinet shop, it’s not even heard in Rennys shaping factory, and visa versa.
Double walls needs to be done ALL the way around ie: you need to do the floor and ceiling too.
Just making a room airtight gets you about a 100-fold reduction in noise.
Double-walling it gets you another factor of 10. At high frequencies. Soundproofing against low frequencies is hopeless.
In either case, single-walling or double-walling, you can check by blasting sound inside the room and walking around the outside with a sound level meter (what - you don’t have one??? Use a mic and laptop). Anyplace there is not an airtight seal, you lose virtually all the soundproofing benefits. Without being airtight, all else is worthless.
In Doc’s case, whereas I value his opinion, I do not think it is useful in practice, and it is an awful lot of work. An hour with a caulk gun and some sealing gaskets around a solid core door and you will be fine.
Try your local hospital… they put intensive patients, as well as non-complacent ones, on egg create foam mats. They toss these out after their hospital stay. If you could get your hands on a dozen of those, hang em on the walls, egg side out - they’ll help break up and absorb the reflections and reverberations… but as stated earlier, it’s all about air tight - might want to start focusing on your air circulation system.
I’ve soundproofed a small building for dust collection system using staggered studs (doc’s method) worked very well.
It’s an old trick, been using it here for at least the 40 years that I’ve personally done walls that way and it works well. It’s all about what can keep sound from being conducted.
Airtight… well, airtight isn’t the reason a room doesn’t let sound out, more like a side effect of a soundproof setup. Consider, if you put up uninsulated walls that were, say, 1/4" plywood panelling on one side of the framing only, sealed or even glassed to make the room completely airtight, it’d still conduct sound beautifully, maybe even resonate to amplify it some, kinda like a guitar does. Or, consider…they make waterproof speakers and sound emtters for sonar and such. If airtight/watertight was the only criteria, then those wouldn’t work, right?
Two things you do need to do are consider what will conduct sound and what will resonate with the stuff that’s making the sound, at the same frequency or a multiple of it.
The first is pretty easy to deal with, you use something that isn’t fastened rigidly to your outside wall or is fastened in a way that’ll absorb sound energy, for instance a ‘soft’ adhesive like one of the PL series of construction goos and few if any mechanical fasteners such as nails or screws. This is how I’d build a door for a room like this, with foam laid in to soak up sound. The nice thing about using the ceiling strapping I described earlier is that it provides a kind of disconnect between the room and the structure around it. Laying in some serious insulation to help muffle and kinda act as a buffer is also a big help.
Resonance …is a beeyotch. You don’t know beforehand, without some pretty serious testing and analysis, what the natural resonant frequencies of your structure are gonna be. And the only way to fix it is to change the natural resonance of the structure one way or another or possibly block the particular frequency. This also has some applications to how fins hum and so on. In any event, if you found that you were getting high frequency ( planer screams ) sounds coming through, you might tack up some carpeting on the walls, or the egg-crate foam that was mentioned above.
It also soaks it up inside the room, which I think is pretty important. Ever been in a brand new house, and you hear that little echo that’ll slowly drive ya crazy? Same thing, squared, if you’re running a power tool in there. The egg-crate stuff is usually soft material, foam or something fiber, so it both messes with the reflected sound pattern ( kills the echo) and absorbs it. Carpet, say short pile stuff like you see being replaced in hotels and such that you can take away for free, that does more in the way of absorbing the sound than messing up the reflection pattern, but it works out the same. In either case, you fasten it to the wall as little as possible so it transmits sound as little as possible.
Really low frequency stuff - well, you’ll get some of that through the floor if nothing else, low frequency stuff is hard to block. It’s not something that you can really get a handle on for direction ( consider a fancy home theater setup - five or more high freq. speakers, one low freq. subwoofer) but then again it takes a pretty healthy source to produce a loud low frequency sound.
Fortunately, it’s not real annoying the way high pitched sounds ( like a planer or router turning at 10,000 RPMs or more with a blade biting in two or three times per rev) are. And a small high freq. source does put out some pretty healthy sound levels. Those you can deal with relatively easily.
hope that’s of use
doc…
What does and doesn’t transmit sound? It all has to do with acoustic impedances. But anything reasonably hard like sheetrock will reflect all but the lowest frequencies. A surface with “infinite” stiffness will be a perfect acoustic reflector. Like a nice granite wall.
If you are airtight inside a bubble of Saran Wrap, the sound proofing will not be so great. Plastic wrap is not stiff.
Anechoic chambers (sound rooms) are stiff-walled airtight chambers. This is precisely what you want. You can buy one suitable for shaping inside for about $20-30k, or you can just seal your sheetrock and door. As for foam and “absorbing” materials, it is all crap for your purpose. It will attenuate reflective noise inside the room, but do VERY little for the sound outside the room.
This is all pretty basic acoustics. If you want to do even better for sound isolation, put a stiff-walled airtight chamber inside another stiff-walled airtight chamber.
http://www.uhfmag.com/Issue63/soundproofing.html
http://www.askthebuilder.com/323_Soundproofing_Rooms_Solves_Noise_Problem.shtml
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul00/articles/faqacoustic.htm
There are two reasons to soundproof a shaping room. To dampen the sound inside so the room is more comfortable to work in and to prevent the wife or neighboors from complaining (keeping the sound from escaping).
Or we can use hand tools.