"Aww shucks" he says while looking down and shuffling his feet.

Thanks guys!

I am liking this look of fronts and backs being the same heights, the top and bottom being inside instead of capping the top and bottom and the sides being in between.

I've done the whole 45 degree corner thing before, but I like how the end grain looks when it is really sanded out.

My co-worker wanted something to show off the wood. so that's what he got from me.

I have maybe another project in me for the rest of the year, but nothing planned, yet.

That is a nice looking speaker!

Gilf,

I'm not even in the same time zone as you are as far as speaker building!

You have major skills!

Well today I bought some mahogany and some maple lumber.
I wonder how dark wood and light wood would compliment each other?

There are some Tang Band W5-2143 drivers hooked up to an amplifier playing in my shop just to put some break-in miles on them.

Hmmm, sounds like a hell of a place to start a speaker project.
Film at 11:00, 10:00 central.

There is a chance that they could end up with some red on them, or not.

I am at a crossroad today.

My mahogany and maple speakers are coming along at a pretty good clip.

They are all cut out, glued up, and sanded.

Today I started putting the finish on them, so far so good.

I just can't come to a decision on what color to finish the MDF parts of them.

Both sides, the back and the bottom are all MDF.

Several ideas that come to mind are satin white, gloss white, satin black, and of course bright red.

So my question to you all is what do you think goes with the wood colors as they are shown here?






Side view:



And yes, the blue tape comes off!!

Looking awesome, Donnie!
Black is always a good backdrop to accentuate national wood.

Should I state the obvious? Red.

I don't have any design experience. My DIY experience in limited to putting together a GR Research speaker kit. I'm probably going down the rabbit hole of putting something together.  I'm interested in a full range driver and possibly pairing it with a tweeter without a crossover or only using a FRD. I might also experiment with using multiple FRDs to improve speed. Should be fun.

Not to take this thread off topic but congrats on your retirement, Donnie! I am so looking forward to mine. It will be the next major event in my life but still some distance away.

Tex, while I encourage you to accept Donnie’s sage assistance, I would not hesitate to pick up a pair of full range drivers and start experimenting. Just stick them in a piece of plywood. You will likely be happy and the more you tweak it the better and better they will get. Welcome to your new addiction. Lol.

Donnie, will do & congrats on the retirement. I'll send a PM with some basic info.

Well, I more or less finished up these mahogany and maple speakers.

The plan for these is to now build some sort of stand for them.
They will probably end up in my bedroom so my wife can get mad at me for having yet more speakers strewn about "her" house.

Interestingly, today is our 32nd anniversary and the first day of my retirement! I like things to be on the same day as to not forget them.

Anyway, here are views of the speakers in my dirty garage.









When I started playing them in my garage, well, I wasn't too impressed.
5" woofers in a 24X24 empty room with a garage door hanging open isn't a recipe for being sterilized by too much bass!

But moving them inside to my listening room made things much better.
The bass improved immensely and the imaging is what makes single drivers famous.
I'm sure that a couple hundred more hours on them will really help them out.

By the way, I have recently jumped back on the tube bandwagon again and am driving these with my Torii.
It feels like Old Home Week.

Well here we go again, for at least another chapter of my mahogany and maple speakers.

I have been playing the crap out of them.
Had them in my listening room, put them in my bedroom, huge mistake there.
That went over like a turd in the punchbowl with "She Who Must Be Obeyed"!
So back to the listening room they went.

The only problem with that is that it meant that now there were six pairs of speakers in my listening room.
And anyone who knows anything, knows that speakers only sound right when they are held to a prime number in any room. (Don't give me any crap that because they are "pairs" of speakers that you can never have a prime number, I'm just telling a story here).

So back out to the garage the mahogany and maple speakers went.
As i have reported before, 5" woofers in a 24"X24" garage sounds a little, shall we say, impotent.

So what to do?
Well a quick shopping spree at Parts express fixed me right up.
I ordered a El Cheapo GRS 8" subwoofer and a even cheaper TPS 3 channel class D Bluetooth amplifier.

As I have made a few Deathbox's from plans that I had bought from Decware with very good results, I figured what the hell, I'll just downsize everything from a 12" to a 8" driver.

Let me tell you, it really worked. Like shake everything off of the wall worked.

So here is where I am now.











I am also currently painting up speaker stands for these speakers.
Painting means that I put a coat on, then sand it off because I screwed up something.
I use about 5 times more material that anyone who knows how to paint ever does.



And yes, my neighbors still hate me.

And now I'm building something completely different but still related.

Today I went out and bought a 48"X 25" X1.5" butcher block countertop from Menard's.

Then I started hacking away on it.  I really didn't have a very fleshed out plan about what I was going to do, but I did it anyway.

So the need is for a amplifier/equipment stand, I want to go vertical instead of horizontal to facilitate turning my listening room 180 deg.

I've grown tired of staring at this same wall for the last 22 years!

As far as the wood hacking, this is what I have done today:

Two shelves and eight legs.



Artsy shot of the legs.



Artsy shot of the shelves.



Tomorrow I will figure out how long to make the legs.

I'm contemplating putting either spikes or some sort of vibration control pads on the legs.

And that brings up the old bugaboo of what is better, rigid to the floor or floating on some sort of spring/elastic puck???

I'm open to suggestions on that front!!!

Tomorrow is sanding and perhaps getting some finish on the wood.
 
The instructions that came with the wood said that it needed to be sealed within 48 hours from removing it from the packaging or bad things would happen!

I'd hate to think that my good luck streak in life would come to an end because I didn't seal some wood up.  I need to contemplate the risk/reward of my actions!

Hey Donnie…great job on the speakers and the stands.  I am finishing up building some outdoor planter boxes to house my palm trees.  

My next project is building a set of speaker stands for my Pinnacle Bookshelf speakers I modified a few months ago with new capacitors.  After going back and forth….I found this design I am going to copy.  I already have the walnut on hand..just need to decide if I’m going to go with mahogany, maple, or another complimentary accent wood.  Here is a picture of the stands that I will be recreating.   Probably cheaper to buy…but I need to hone in on my skills….because after that…I will be working on a crate to hold more vinyl.

Donnie…thanks!

I actually like the idea of poplar!  It looks like it’s time swap out the DeWalt combo blade on my compound miter saw, and throw in my finer tooth Orange blade.

Looks good Donnie! Nice work.

LOVELY!

Now I am getting to the actual reason of why I built the new equipment rack.

I turned my listening room around 180 degrees. It had been pointed the same way since December of '02 when we moved into this place.

Well it is different for sure.
It might even sound better this way, a lot more bass for sure.

It didn't go painlessly though.
I tore up my Mapleshade foil interconnects in a not paying attention to how long they were while walking situation. Stepped right on one and tore it apart. I needed to pay closer attention to where my big feet were stomping. Oh well!

I did end up offsetting the furniture a bit so I now have a listening chair instead of a listening couch.

I'm sure that there will be some adjustment of things as I get more settled in.

A few photos:



A fisheye of the room.



My old desk has been moved and it now has my Maple and Mahogany speakers on it for sound from my computer.
My old Wadia DAC AMP is powering them.
Nearfield listening is really spooky!



And a straight on view of my equipment rack with all of my stuff on it.

I have been reading about crossovers for the last few days and still don't understand much of it.

A friend of mine who has a pair of my "Rockers" speakers keeps blowing out his HiVi tweeters, how, I don't have a clue. I've cranked my speakers hard for years.

Anyway, he decided to buy a different tweeter and have me put them in a pair of new speakers.

The big problem is that the new tweeters are 105 dB efficient and the old ones were 94 dB. The 8" drivers are also 94 dB.
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to knock the extra 11 dB off of the tweeter and maybe actually build a crossover that will do crossover things.

I see that a whole bunch of other people can do these types of things so I guess I can too.

Wish me luck.

There are nice builds in here.  Donnie, are your monitors transmission line loudspeakers?

I am playing with the idea is building from scratch a transmission line design or a monitor with a passive radiator.  

Donnie

What are you using now for the crossover for this RT1C-A that your friend keeps blowing?

Is it always a (cheap) class D amp that blows the RT1C-A?


Dan

What is the capacitor size?

Here is the very simple crossover tool I use a lot:

https://www.diyaudioandvideo.com/Calculator/SpeakerCrossover/

Your tweeter spec says 5 ohms, 3k-21k hz, 20w, 93db 2.83v/1m and recommended crossover 2nd order, 3k hz or above.

A single capacitor is 1st order (6db/octave) meaning that if the crossover point is 3khz, 1 octave below that (1500 hz) the signal will be 6 db down.  A 2nd order adds an inductor to get 12 db/octave attenuation, meaning at 1500 hz the signal is 12db down...this is the recommended minimum crossover.  So your capacitor is letting a lot of audio get to the tweeter in the 1k-3k range that shouldn't be getting there.  Usually with just a capacitor you would pick the crossover point well above the minimum, like 2 or 3 khz for a tweeter that could crossover at 1khz with a 2nd order crossover.  2-3 times your 3khz wouldn't make sense, its too high.

Plugging your numbers into the calculator and playing around a bit, I come up with a 3200 hz 2nd order Linkwitz-Riley design that uses a 5.1uf capacitor (Parts Express 027-423 for $1.69) followed by a .5mh inductor (Parts Express 257-036 for $4.39).  So, $6 per side (plus tax and shipping)

If your tweeter is too loud, put a resistor in front of the (tweeter + crossover).  If your woofer is too loud, put a resistor in front of the woofer.  

Dan

So to update on what I have been working on the last few weeks.

First I built a dining room table for my wife. She wanted a much smaller and narrower table than she could find at a store, so I made her one.

Now making one didn't involve chopping down a tree and planing down wood, It was a short trip to Lowe's to get a fancy wood countertop and making it the correct size.
I then sanded and put finish on to end that operation of the project.

A quick Google search found me at the Leg Shop, where I put in a order for steel legs.

When the legs came in, I bolted them on, and boom, dining room table!

Wife happy, check!



Well after all of that bull mess, I still had about 3 foot of countertop left over.
What to do with the material? It was expensive stuff, no reason to waste.

Well I needed speaker stands to set my garage rocker speakers on during the winter when I move them inside.

So sawing, gluing, sanding took place. A few coats of boiled linseed oil and some bee's wax were slathered on, and kaboom, speaker stands!







So now I'm thinking about the next thing to make.
I need to keep my mind busy or I will want start back on my Manifesto, and believe me when I say that no one wants that to happen!