How To Make DIY Sound Absorption Acoustic Panels For $20!
I built 9 of these simple DIY acoustic panels for the new workshop to reduce echo and absorb sound! They are a simple DIY project and can be built for a little as $20 each, way cheaper than commercial versions.
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🛠 Tools Used On The Acoustic Panels:
📦 Materials Used On The Acoustic Panels:
Two and a half 8 foot 2x4s per panel
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Process For Building Acoustic Panels:
These acoustic panels can be built from multiple different types of wood, but we used 2x4s since we had a bunch leftover from framing out this shop space. That said, 1x4s would make for a lighter weight panel, or you could even use plywood ripped into 3 ½” wide strips if you had some scraps lying around.
Since the insulation we used is designed to work with a 16” on center stud spacing and comes in 4 foot lengths, we decided to make the panels match those dimensions to avoid having to cut the insulation.
The long sides of the panels were cut to 96 inches and the center pieces were cut to 14 ½ inches. If you buy your lumber in 8 foot lengths, you can get one panel out of two and a half pieces, or two panels out of five pieces.
Step 1: Cut to length
As you can see, we’re using a miter saw here, but a circular saw or even hand saw would have no trouble cutting the pieces for this project. Since we were building nine of these frames, we needed to be as efficient as possible, but don’t let the fact that you don’t own a miter saw stop you from trying this project.
Before assembling the frame, we marked the center of the long sides and transferred a line across the inside face of those pieces, which just made lining up the center pieces during assembly easier.
Since we were building so many of these, my buddy Justin was able to mark the centers out while I cut the 2x4s to size.
Step 2: Assembly
On to assembly! We used 3” deck screws to assemble the frame, adding two screws at each connection point. These screws don’t require any pre-drilling, which really sped up the assembly process.
We made sure to keep the pieces as flush as we could during assembly, but you can see that some of these 2x4s were pretty dang twisted. One tip here is to drive the screws in partially before assembling the frames, as it leaves you with one free hand to hold the boards in place while driving in the screws.
Also, you could definitely clamp these pieces together, which would give you a cleaner joint, but these frames won’t really be seen in this space so we weren’t as worried about the joints being perfect.
If you’re using 1x4s rather than 2x4s, you should use 1 ¼” screws instead. I would also recommend pre-drilling the holes to prevent splitting in that case, since the holes will be much closer to the ends of the boards, but again that’s not really necessary with 2x4s.
Step 3: Fabric wrapping
Once we built the frames, we could get the fabric attached. We used this white landscape fabric that Justin had leftover from a previous project, but pretty much any fabric that allows sound to pass through would work. A lot of people use burlap when building these panels, as it’s inexpensive, readily available, and looks pretty nice.
We cut the fabric to width, which worked out almost perfectly to cutting this fabric in half lengthwise, and we made sure to leave at least about 6” of overhanging fabric wrapped around the back of the frame.
To attach the fabric, we used a pneumatic narrow crown stapler, since we were building ten of these panels, but pretty much any staple gun would work.
Since we were using a pneumatic stapler, we made sure to do some tests and lowered the air pressure so the staples didn’t fire right through the fabric.
When attaching fabric to a frame like this, there is a pattern to follow that ends up significantly reducing the number of wrinkles you end up with.
First, we added a few staples at the center of each end, making sure to stretch the fabric around the frame, keeping it taught when adding the staples.
Next, we repeated the same step on the long sides of the frame, adding staples at the center.
With the fabric tacked into place, we slowly worked our way outwards from the center of each side, adding a few staples while keeping the fabric taught.
As we worked our way towards the corners, the wrinkles were pulled out and we were left with a nice, clean edge.
When we got to the corners, we would gather the excess fabric, tucking one face flat against the frame, and then we could fold over the excess at a 45 degree angle.
Again, while holding the fabric taught, we would add some more staples to hold the corners in place.
Finally, we flipped over the panel and added a few staples in the center divider, which will help to keep the fabric from sagging under the weight of the insulation, since we hung these panels horizontally. If you’re planning to hang your panels vertically, this step isn’t necessary.
As you can tell, these crown staplers really came in handy since we had so many of these to build. Our hands would have been exhausted had we used normal staple guns!
Step 4: Insulation
On to the insulation! We used this ROCKWOOL SAFE’n’SOUND sound proof insulation, which is the same insulation we used in the walls of this shop space.
Each bag of insulation is about $50 and a bag contains 12 bats, enough for six of these acoustic panels. This insulation is also readily available at most home centers.
Adding the insulation was super simple, since we sized the frames to fit the bats without cutting them. All we needed to do was stuff the insulation in place, making sure not to compact it too much, which would reduce the sound proofing qualities. After adding the insulation, we would add a few more staples to hold the excess fabric in place.
Also, this insulation is extremely itchy, so we wore gloves during this process and made sure to avoid touching it with our exposed skin, and I actually put on a long sleeve shirt and respirator when we were adding the insulation to the rest of the nine frames.
Step 5: Mounting
After adding the insulation, we added these little angle brackets called joist angles, which are only about fifty cents each and were perfect for this. I’ll have a link to these brackets, along with all of the other tools and materials I used, in the video description below.
I used 1 ¼” screws to attach the brackets to the frame, but you’d want to use shorter screws, something in the neighborhood of ¾”, if you were using 1x4s for your frames.
As I mentioned earlier, we mounted the panels horizontally on the ceiling in my shop. Before mounting, we marked out the location of the panel so that the panels would be centered between the lights, and then we could get them mounted.
Since my ceiling is concrete, we had to use a hammer drill to drill the holes and then we used 1 ¼” concrete anchors to attach the panels to the ceiling.
If you’re mounting these panels to a standard ceiling with wood joists above it, you would first need to use a stud finder to find your joist locations and then make sure to drive your screws into those joists. I would recommend something like 2” lag screws for fastening these panels to wooden joists, that should provide plenty of holding power.
We just continued mounting the panels until we had them all in place, and then I could record an audio test to see how much the panels impacted the echo in the space.
