Taking the Stones Advice

The painted bas and top boards drying out

Most of the tools I’ve used so far in the project.

The painted baffle and Rear Panel. Haven’t painted the sides of baffle in fear of it being pushed out-this paints quite thick.

The Baffle and Rear from the front drying.

The constructed box with the painted insides.

The speaker from another angle. You can see how the battens match too.

The Stretch frame before it gets painted.

The drying stretcher frame painted.

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.

Battens and Markings

I thought I did these markings correctly but that was a bit of a mistake-I didn’t take into account the stretcher frame would probably need a couple of mm more space (I don’t want it sticking out the front so this was just for caution. Remember the speaker cloth has to go round it too as well as the lining around it.)

Here are the first markings I did wrong.

The top board all marked out for today.

Here are the side boards marked and ready for today (done last night). They have marked slanted vertical battens due to the slant of the speaker. The battens are therefore slanted (achieved by sanding to a slant).

Here are my four base battens glued and screwed.

The work of the day. You can see the markings.

Here are the tools I used today to cut the battens.

Some of my hand sawed poorly cut battens. Nothing some sanding shouldn’t correct though.

So over the past few days I cut and fixed some battens to the bottom board. The magazine only suggested gluing the battens but I’ve put screws through the top of the batten, into the board to add rigidity as well as PVA glueing them.

The magazine didn’t originally require battens along the side of the base board but I added them anyway. This will strengthen the side boards massively but you will need more batten wood. Another downside is that it will increase resonance which may be a good or bad thing. My personal view is that the overall strength of the cab is slightly more crucial than the resonance (although these battens will have little affect to resonance anyway). Due to this, I will be adding side battens to the top board too-which is todays task.

One thing I’ve noted is that the baffle board will be slanted slightly-as will the stretcher frame (made from same wood as the battens). The stretcher frame is a frame that is covered in speaker cloth and placed in front of the speaker. I’m still figuring out how this will be attached to the baffle…

Because the stretcher frame is made from the same wood as the battens (softwood), you need to place the baffle the width of the wood behind the front of the speaker cab (in my situation this is 18mm-mark using the actual wood instead of the guided measurements though. I will not be making the stretcher frame quite yet though.

Today I will hopefully cut the side battens and sand them to a slant. I might even get round to fixing them and some of the top board battens.

At some point I’ll also need to paint the baffle board black. This is because the baffle board is visible through the stretcher frames speaker cloth on the front.