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YOU CAN BUILD A VIBRATION-PROOF LAB CHAMBER FOR 400 DOLLARS FROM A KITCHEN CABINET AND HONEY

A flat-pack kitchen cabinet, a cast concrete table, four springs and honey dampers give you a 400-dollar vibration isolation chamber for precision experiments.

by Håvard Vestad and Martin Steinert

FULL CAD BOM FIRMWARE DOCS

WorkshopScience

difficulty
●●●○○
time
a long weekend
license
CC-BY-4.0
repo
repo FINISHED0 stars

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

1
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COMPAREE VERDICT

This is a genuinely clever solve for a problem most people never see until it ruins a weekend's data. Anything at micrometre scale - microscopy, interferometry, sensor calibration, precision balances - picks up the building: footsteps and traffic transmitted through the floor, and the authors target the 5 to 20 Hz band associated with traffic. Labs normally buy passive isolation optical tables; this chamber costs about 400 dollars in parts. The shell is an IKEA METOD kitchen cabinet. Inside, a cast concrete table hangs from four springs you wind from spring steel wire, and the dampers are steel balls sitting in honey. The walls are lined with acoustic foam behind a Plexiglas window. The paper shows the measurement rather than claiming a number: the undamped table's power spectral density peaks around 1.15 Hz, and the decay curve of the damped table gives a damping ratio of about 0.12. The build is documented across 42 figures, most of them photographs of the real assembly. The one thing most likely to go wrong is the spring tuning - the design assumes an operating mass of 46.3 kg, so you add mass or adjust springs to match your rig. If you do not already have a precision measurement problem, this is a solution looking for one; if you do, this is the weekend that pays for itself in data you can actually trust.

GOOD TO KNOW

  • —CAD files and full BOM with supplier links are in the OSF repository at doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/D6XAB.
  • —The paper itself is the build guide: 42 figures, most of them photographs of the actual assembly.
  • —Licence is CC BY 4.0 — open for commercial use with attribution.
  • —No firmware or electronics involved; this is a passive mechanical system.
  • —The cabinet dimensions and spring calculations are given, but you will need to match the mass plate to your specific measurement rig.
  • —Performance is shown with measured decay curves and power spectral density plots, not just claimed.

Parts to buy

9 items

From our check of the build. Exact quantities and part numbers are in the creator’s BOM.

  • IKEA METOD kitchen cabinet with VEDDINGE door and topFind
  • M8 eyeboltsFind
  • Concrete mix for the tableFind
  • 12 m of spring steel wire for the springsFind
  • MDF for the casting mouldFind
  • PlexiglasFind
  • Acoustic foamFind
  • FeltFind
  • Rubber gasket sheetFind

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Can I build this?

Printnothing required
BuyIKEA METOD kitchen cabinet with VEDDINGE door and top, M8 eyebolts, concrete mix for the table, 12 m of spring steel wire for the springs, 15 mm steel bearing spheres and a jar of honey for the dampers, MDF for the casting mould, Plexiglas, acoustic foam, felt, rubber gasket sheet — full BOM (about 397 dollars) in the paper and on OSF
Toolslaser cutter (or a makerspace) for the MDF mould, bucket and trowel for casting the concrete table, drill, pliers for winding springs from steel wire, screwdriver, basic hand tools
Skillsbasic workshop skills: laser-cutting the DXF parts (or making them by hand), casting concrete, winding springs from steel wire, and following the spring-stiffness calculation to match your rig's mass
TimeA long weekend plus curing time: assembling the cabinet and cutting the MDF and acrylic parts is an afternoon, casting the concrete table needs time to cure, and winding and tuning the springs is where the iteration happens
CostModerate, about 400 dollars (396.70 in the paper's BOM): the IKEA cabinet, door and fittings and the acoustic foam are the biggest items; the spring wire is about 40 dollars and the concrete under 10.
SafetyStandard workshop precautions for the drill and laser cutter. Wet concrete is caustic - wear gloves and eye protection when mixing. The concrete table plus added mass weighs about 46 kg in operation; get help lifting it. No electrical or mains hazards.

Build at your own risk. Projects involve tools, electronics and sometimes mains voltage — follow the creator’s safety notes.

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Gallery

sciencedirect.com
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Start here

Navigation into the creator’s own docs — we don’t rewrite the guide, we route you to the source.

  1. 1.Read the full paper at ScienceDirect (The paper is open access and serves as the complete build guide, with 42 figures, most of them photographs of the actual assembly.)
  2. 2.Download the CAD files and BOM from the OSF repository (Contains the cabinet cutting plans, mass plate dimensions, spring specifications, and full parts list with supplier links.)
  3. 3.Measure your measurement rig and calculate the mass plate weight(The spring stiffness and mass plate need to match your specific setup. The paper gives the calculation in the 'Springs and table' part of its design section.)
  4. 4.Assemble the IKEA cabinet and laser-cut the MDF mould, window and damper parts(The paper uses an IKEA METOD kitchen cabinet. The parts you cut are the MDF mould for the concrete table (DXF for a laser cutter) and the damper parts.)

KNOWN ISSUES

  • The mass plate weight and spring stiffness must match your specific measurement rig. The paper gives the calculation, but if you skip measuring and just copy their numbers, the isolation frequency will be wrong.
  • Mark the eyebolt holes carefully with the laser-cut MDF template: if the four eyebolts are not evenly placed, the springs will not hang level and the table will tilt.
  • Acoustic foam is secondary to the mechanical isolation. Do not spend money upgrading the foam and then cheap out on the springs — the springs are where the isolation happens.
  • The chamber is designed for small rigs. If your measurement setup is large or heavy, you will need a bigger cabinet and heavier-duty springs, which changes the whole cost calculation.
  • Commercial passive isolation tables are the closest analog the paper names; it does not give their price, so compare current quotes yourself if cost is the deciding factor.
  • The paper shows performance for their specific rig at NTNU. Your floor, building and measurement frequency range may behave differently — this is not a plug-and-play guarantee.

Can I use a different cabinet instead of the IKEA METOD?

Yes, as long as the internal dimensions fit your rig and the top can carry the eyebolts the springs hang from. The paper uses an IKEA METOD kitchen cabinet because it is cheap, widely available and quick to build.

Do I need the acoustic foam, or is the spring isolation enough?

The springs and honey dampers do the heavy lifting for low-frequency floor vibrations (the authors measured 5-20 Hz as the critical band). The foam helps with airborne noise inside the chamber, but it is secondary. If cost is tight, prioritise the springs and dampers.

How do I know if my floor vibrations are bad enough to need this?

If you see noise in your measurements that lines up with people walking past or traffic, or your data is better at night, floor vibration is the likely cause. The paper demonstrates this with a simple footstep test on a sensitive sample; if you have an accelerometer, measure your own floor in the 5 to 20 Hz range.

Can I scale this up for a larger rig?

In principle yes, but the cost savings shrink as you scale. The chamber works because a flat-pack cabinet is cheap at small sizes. A larger cabinet with heavier springs and a bigger mass plate starts to approach the cost of entry-level commercial solutions.

Is this equivalent to a full optical table?

No. A high-end optical table is a precision-machined honeycomb structure with integrated threaded holes and a much larger working area. This chamber isolates a small rig from floor vibrations at a fraction of the cost, but it does not replace the work surface, rigidity or convenience of a commercial table.

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Discussion1

FROM THE COMPAREE TEAM

The undamped table's power spectral density peaks around 1.15 Hz in their setup — but every floor is different. If you have measured your own floor vibrations, what frequency are you fighting?

CompareeTEAM19d agoedited

Practical notes from our verification: the OSF repository (doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/D6XAB) holds the build files, including the DXF for the laser-cut MDF mould the concrete table is cast in, and the paper's bill of materials names every part and where it came from — an IKEA METOD kitchen cabinet, spring steel wire for the springs, steel spheres in honey as dampers, acoustic foam. The paper is unusually hands-on for an academic publication, with 42 figures that walk through the build step by step. The total comes to roughly 400 dollars; the paper names passive optical isolation tables as the closest commercial analog but gives no price for them. The one thing to watch is that the resonance frequency depends on how far the springs stretch under the load — if your table mass differs from theirs, you will not land on their 1.2 Hz. There is no video walkthrough, but the step-by-step figures are detailed enough to follow. Correction (4 October 2026): we re-checked this page line by line against the project's own repository, documentation and videos, and fixed errors in earlier versions.

Håvard Vestad and Martin Steinert

Havard Vestad and Martin Steinert are researchers at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. They built this chamber to make precision measurement accessible in labs that cannot budget for commercial isolation tables. The project was published in HardwareX, a journal specifically for open-source scientific hardware, in 2022.

Web

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