What is a Freefloat?

A Freefloat is an inflatable device that you place under your turntable and on top of the desk. More information about the Freefloat Turntable Stabilizer can be found in this topic on our website.

As everybody knows that has used the Freefloat's, you probably noticed that working with the Freefloat's gives you a bit of a wobbly feeling. Each time you make a scratch or give the platter of the turntable a pitch-bend the whole turntable wobbles a bit. Even with inflating or deflating the Freefloat this is something that can hardly be solved.

The proper way to use the Freefloat is almost half-deflated, but that also increases the 'wobble-ness' of the Freefloat.

How does the idea came up?

Then I (Lead) noticed a posting on our forum that was made by michelvandebeek. In this post he mentioned that Peter Gelderblom (owner of club Revolution and a DJ himself) found a solution in surrounding the Freefloat with foam.

What Peter used was the inlay of a turntable flightcase to stabilize his Freefloat's Because I understood foam as the dutch "Purschuim" I did the following experiment with a Freefloat even though this is an interpretation of a misunderstanding.

Basically this is something new I came up with... and it works !

Tools that you need

The tools that I used to make this tweak is shown on the right. Besides a Freefloat you only need a few other tools. A saw, hammer and pencil is needed to make the box that determines the shape of the foam.

A can of foam ('Purschuim' in dutch) is needed offcourse, I used a complete can of it, but when used in a decent way you probably only need half of it. But because it's fun stuff to mess around with I just used the whole can.

Create a box

The first thing to do is creating a box so that the foam, when expanding during drying cannot exceed a certain shape. The material you use to create this box is free to choose. I used wood because you can saw and nail this very easy. The only way the foam can expand is to the top.

Foam that is there unnecessary can be cut away with a sharp knife once the foam has completely dried. In general this will be in 24 hours.

Cover the box with foil

The easiest way to prevent the foam from sticking to your shape is to cover it all up with thin plastic foil. The seams of the rows of foil need to overlap. Sticking or using tape to hold the foil strips together is not necessary, this will be done by the pressure that the foam creates while drying and expanding. When the foam becomes hard it's fairly easy to strip of all remaining's of the foil. For the working of it all there is no need to remove these remaining's.

Apply the Foam

When you are ready with the thin plastic foil you're ready for the big job : using the foam. This is also the most fun part of the job.

Evenly spread the foam in the box, not directly putting it to the Freefloat because once this foam touches something it will be very hard to remove. That is also the reason why you see these small parts of black stage-tape in the center part of the Freefloat. I wanted to protect the logo from being covered by foam if it would expand to much.

Because I wasn't exactly sure what and how the foam would expand I placed this on top of the branding logo of the Freefloat. Afterward I found this to be not necessary.

It's more important to put the foam to the outlines of the Freefloat than the outside of the box you've created. The foam that sticks to the freefloat gives it's stability. The foam to the outline of the box only gives a cosmetically nice look when all foam is hardened.

Keep the Freefloat to it's place with your hand. It can be easily moved and than it messes up al foam that you just placed around it. Since the foam works very easy and can be applied with one hand, you can use your other hand to hold the Freefloat.

Let the foam dry and harden for 20-24 hours !

This is what the Freefloat Stabilizer looks like when it has dried and the thin foil is mostly removed from the foam :

Offcourse you could now unleash your creativity and spray paint it in the colors you like... just don't put paint on the freefloat, hit the foam only.

Technical

And offcourse it's easy to make such a thing, but the big question is : Does it work ?

It would be nice if I could measure the SPL on the Freefloat but I'm not sure how to measure this in a decent way. To get some bass-pressure I've put my 12" subwoofer (Syrincs BP12) next to it and tried to get feedback in the low-frequencies by putting up the volume.

On this point the original Freefloat has a little advantage over the modified version. The unmodified versions could handle about 3dB more, read from the output LED's of my amplifier (Macky M-1400).

I use the 2 channel stereo connections of this amplifier, but the sub is connected to the 4Ohms bridged terminals. This should send up to 1400 Watts to the subwoofer which equal to a 94dB SPL at max. The max couldn't be reached on both.

Then came the more practical test: use both Freefloat's in a mix-setup. When you touch the decks you'll notice a difference directly. The 'foamed' Freefloat is much more stable and easy to handle. Also when doing some scratches it could handle much more than the unthreaded Freefloat.

Final Conclusion

The foaming gives you much more stability, but can stand a little less bass pressure. I would definitely prefer stability over that bit extra pressure it could handle.

But would I suggest you to do this ?
Only when you are not bothered by the ugly foam, it works but surely doesn't look cool...

---