Speaker build

What good is a set of speakers that's busted and collecting dust on a shelf!

I took it upon myself to blow new life into one of my father's old speaker sets.

The woofer drivers were in rough shape and the housing was chipped in a couple of places. So I started from scratch designing new cabinets and grills. After some TLC the hardware was ready to be married with the new cabinets.

After a period of being inside all the time and twirling my fingers, it was time to get out my lazy chair and get to work on this idea that had been sitting in the back of my head for a while.

I started sketching and trying out shapes and details I wanted the new cabinets to have. Thanks to some consultation with my girlfriend I landed on the final shape, which was curvy!

The dimensions of the speaker cabinets are based on the original Philips speakers, because I plan on using the same drivers.

I started by gluing the side panels and top and bottom panels together. In the corners, reinforcing blocks are added. The front and back panels will be mounted later on.

The choice for exclusive glueing was made because there will be large roundings at the edges. wooden plugs would be visible here later between the layers of plywood.

For rounding the inner corner, a jig was made with the required radius. Using the router with a flush trim bit, the shape is perfectly copied into the workpiece.

Making he outer rounding was a lot easier than the inner one. I sawed off a series of corners at incrementally larger angles of 10°, 22.5°, 34° and 45°. This way, I could approximate a circular shape and I only had to sand it down afterwards to get it nice and even.I also took these steps for the front and back plates, because that is quite similar, only with a smaller radius.