Designing a better bed

[Sven]

The sides of the bed are 3mmx80mm steel plate.
The bottom is 3mm steel plate.
The reinforcing is 20mm x 20mm hollow steel square.

After much reading about the wondrous technology of constrained layer damping, it turns out that one of the very best 'viscoelastic damping materials' is butyl and it needs to 0.5mm to 1mm for the sort of things we do.

Which is handy, because the super spiffy visc

£90 in steel
£10 in pond liner
£140 in epoxy
£20 in milled carbon
£25 in aggregate

£285 total

I've been very generous with the epoxy as that is the scary expensive part, £140 assumes an 18% by volume mix but hopefully it will average out lower than that. I could still go to almost 25% epoxy and break even with the aluminium.

Any thoughts or comments on this approach for a DIY bed?

Forgot to reply to the general idea...

Here are some thoughts

- Epoxy adheres well to steel but may not stay bonded due to differences in thermal expansion. That would make the steel tub a bit overkill
- If you use that much epoxy it is likely to form a layer on top of the casting.
- Using milled carbon as well as steel tubing is a bit like suspenders and belt to keep your pants up. And still, 20.-- seems a small amount.
- using tubing instead of bars lowers the mass/volume which I think is a good idea.
- I would use round tubing though as I think it would leave for a stronger EG mass.
- You can probably get away with using pvc piping instead of steel if the plate is thick enough