Adding damping material to speakers and blisters to my hands

Sunday means time to work. I started working on the damping material issue. Starting with marking all panels so I knew where to put the material and where to not put anything.
Then I started cutting everything to pieces with a pair of scissors. I fetched the hot glue gun from the workshop and decided to work in my room instead because I had carried all the stuff to my room and it was fairly cold in the workshop.

A big mess in my room. Nice to have a big mat so I don't have to be afraid of damaging the panels because of some tiny gravel or something on the floor.

My hot glue gun. An el-cheapo version but it does the job.

Everything done, although I'm lacking a tiny piece for the last top panel. I've decided to not put anything on the back panels because it would obstruct the ports I think. Might put a tiny bit next to the brace, I'll see.

So what remains is finishing the last top panel and then glue the blue stuff seen to the left in the last picture to the brace. But first I need to buy more glue, I used all of the few sticks I had. Hopefully I wont burn myself on the gun as many times next time and avoid getting hot glue on my fingers because it hurts quite much.

Another thing I've noticed is the weight. The birchply cabinets will be a lot heavier than the particle board ones. Probably two or three times heavier.

Finishing the side panels and finding a problem

Today I decided to finish the side panels. It was easy and it took me less than half an hour to finish the remaining two panels.

When I was finished I tried dry-fitting the speakers and then I found a problem. The brace appeared to be too long, or the inner sides on the side panels were too far in. I measured the side panels and there was 21mm from the end of the inner side to the back wall and that's all correct. The brace was not too long because the baffle was aligned well with the bottom panel. I can't leave a 2-3mm gap between the baffle and the side panels so the only option was to sand the baffle down by a couple of millimeters. Took me maybe half an hour to get it right but now the baffle and side panels fit well with eachother. One problem that might occur is that the magnet of the driver will hit the brace too early. Then I will have to sand the brace at the driver cutout. I will do check that the next time I'm in the mood for building (read: when I have time). That would mean removing a driver from my current speaker and fitting it in the birchply cabinets. Hopefully I'll be able to put the driver back in my particle board cabinets, otherwise I'll be without speakers for a while.

I also talked to Olskogen Trävittra today (mentioned them in another post) and they said they could do the 45 degree cuts for me. Isn't that wonderful?

What remains to be done is:

1. Make sure the drivers doesn't hit the brace too early. If they do, sand it down a bit until it fits.
2. Drill holes for the drivers in the baffles. Four holes per baffle.
3. Fit dampening material on the bottom, back, sides, top and baffles. Draw lines on the panels to know where I can fit the material without hitting any other panels.
4. Mount side panels to the rest of the cabinet
5. Make sure the terminal fits in the hole and if it doesn't, sand it a bit so it fits and then mount it.
6. Prepare wires from the terminal to the driver. I think I'll use one or two strands of CAT5 networking cable.
7. Fit the baffle to the rest of the box.
8. Again make sure the driver fits well and that it's not hitting the brace and find out how many spacers I need between driver and brace.
9. Mount the top panel. Hopefully all other panels are of the same height otherwise I'd need to sand them down and that can be a pain in the arse to get them all even. But since they're CNC-cut they should be fine.
10. Call Olskogen Trävittra and visit them to get the 45 degree cuts done.
11. Solder the cables to the drivers and mount them and be careful not to slip with the screwdriver.
12. Plug and play!

I got another package today that contained some pornography :D

Today I got the package from Ingvar containing tweeters, woofers, solder, wires for the tweeters and blade connectors for all drivers. I'm really excited to start building these but I have to finish the dMar-Kel70T first.

This it was it looked like when I opened the box containing the woofers. Really sexy indeed!

The voicecoil is 3" (really big) and sits on the outside instead of the inside making it fully visible. This allows for better cooling of the VC and therefore the driver can take up to 1000 watts (10ms)

The tweeter. Doesn't look special in any way, as far as I know. What struck me though was how light it was was.

5000 pageviews!

Seems like my blog just passed 5000 pageviews. Keep it going and please comment :)

By the way, I was supposed to continue building on my speakers today but I forgot it and went photographing instead. This is what the sunset looked like (took me a while to find out how to get the picture right so by then half of the magic was gone).

Click to enlarge the picture

Another day working with the dMar-Kel70T

Today the goal was to join the brace, back and bottom pieces together and make holes for the terminals. I am glad to say I actually achieved that and a little more. I'll skip the smalltalk and go directly to the pictures and comment them instead. As they say, one picture can say more than a thousand words. Click the pictures to make them a bit bigger.

Here I have cut holes for the terminals in the back panel and in the brace and joined these two panels together. The hole for the terminal was 53mm and I had no hole saw of that size so it had to be done manually with a jigsaw.

Back, bottom and brace joined together.

Both done.

When I glued the port spacers onto to the outsides I kept a millimeter or two on the other side towards the back panel to make sure it didn't poke out and to make sure I had enough of it in the other end for the 45 degree cut. This reulted in the spacers being too long so I couldn't fit the baffle so they had to be cut about 2mm so we did this with a jigsaw. Don't try to make a clean cut in birchply with a jigsaw, you will fail!

The first set of sides being joined together. Note there's only four screws here and clamps in the middle.

This time I decided to use eight screws instead so I could skip the clamps and get a better pressing force on all spacers. I also screwed the screws a lot harder this time.

One finished set of side panels, only two left!

I couldn't resist dry-fitting it using speaker number two as a top panel (the real top panel wasn't in the workshop at the moment). So this is how it will look like when it's all done except the 45 degree cuts in the front.

Done for the day. Much work has been done and two sets of side panels still remain. Then I will start mounting terminals, wire, damping materials, top panel and eventually get ready for the 45 degree cut.

As for the 45 degree cut I realise that I wont be able to do that at hope, I simply lack the tools to make a nice clean cut. I will contact a company called Olskogen Trävittra which is close to where I live. Dad knows the owner so hopefully he'll help me out with this. He ought to have the tools and experience needed, since he's building furniture, skis and guitars. Tomorrow I'll finish the side panels (if I have time) and me and dad will continue building on wednesday if everything goes as planned.