profdant139 wrote:
lawrosa, that tent gives me another idea -- there must be flexible sound deadening fabric. Now imagine putting up a simple frame and tossing a big sound blanket over the frame. Assuming we can figure out the intake and exhaust issues, that would be a lot easier than assembling hard-sided panels.
Sound deadening relies on stiffness and mass, generally speaking; you need a material that will not transmit the sound waves (energy) from one side to the other. Fabrics and foam and such can absorb sound, but it takes a lot more than a single layer of fabric to do too much in that regard (and the effectiveness is greater if there's a stiff backing associated with it).
As to the general idea of a break-down quiet box for a generator, it certainly seems that should be practicable to construct. I'm not sure you'd save a whole lot of storage space, though, since with a non-knock-down version one would presumably store the generator inside the box for transport and so the wasted space would just be the extra space around the generator (and that presumably could be used to store things like an extension cord). I rather doubt the broken-down box and generator combined would take up much less space in total, though it would be configured differently.
