So today I constructed the cabinet temporarily. This involved drilling pilot holes in the battens and then putting the actual screws through which allows the screws to go vertically down (despite this I still managed to mess up a few). AT THIS POINT I DID NOT ACTUALLY SCREW THE PIECES TOGETHER I just screwed through the battens out to the other side (for the purposes of increasing the grip when it does go through.
After this I then screwed the cabinet together-you may need someone to hold the panels for you. You need screws which will bite about halfway into the wood, just don’t get ones that come out the other end. Flathead screws in particular so they keep the wood flat.
I put all of the screws in through the inside of the cabinet so there won’t be any screw heads showing on the outside which gives me the opportunity of painting the outside-although I’m going to upholster it anyway. It also makes it look a bit neater.
Once I had put it all together I got an electric sander on it-can be done manually but wow is the electric sander useful. It only has to glide over the wood. The end product of the sander is really well sanded corners and any parts of the wood that don’t meet up will be sanded down so they do. Takes about 10 mins although the sand paper kept falling off!
Painting followed in the afternoon. I’m painting the inside only here because you will be able to see into the back. I put two coats of black paint on which was nice and easy because of the weather. I painted the baffle too because you’ll be able to see it through the gaps in the speaker cloth (So paint it in correspondence to the colour of your speaker cloth!). Tip about painting-always paint in one direction and do full strokes all the way dup and down the wood once the paint is applied-gives a neater finish.
Afterwards I built and painted the Stretcher frame which will be covered in the speaker cloth and then placed into the square gap between the front of the speaker. I had a few issues here. I cut the wood to the sizes that I’d calculated (taking in account the width of the upholstery cloth on both sides of both surfaces and the white piping which will surround the stretcher frame). The wood was typically warped -_- I stapled the bits together with a staple gun which very temporarily gave me time to screw the wood pilot holes…until the staples came apart. After a few more stapling periods and use of clamping with the workmate I got the holes drilled and the screws in…and then it snapped due to the screws not being long enough (I was using the same ones as I did for the batten-to-MDF screws. Solution? Get longer screws. After trying again using the same wood but deeper holes I got the frame together and painted with two coats. The frame should be painted all around for safety just so you don’t have to worry if you need to alter the positioning of the stretcher frame due to warped wood.
I’ll try to fix the warped wood by placing something heavy and wide on it tomorrow.
Creating A Speaker Cabinet 