Ever since I started this hobby, the urge to want to build more and more speakers never seems to stop. I ended up building these speakers for my dad to use in his computer room at home. Even though I have already built a good number of the very nice sounding speaker projects that can be found on Parts Express and Speakerbuilder.net, I wanted to try and create my own design. I'm a big fan of Dayton drivers so I knew I would be using them in this project; however, I wanted to use different Dayton drivers than the ones used in most of the posted projects. I noticed Parts Express had just recently introduced some new Dayton drivers, which used aluminum cones. I really liked the new look and was very interested in how they sounded. Since the speakers were going to be small, I went with the smallest of the aluminum series, the 5-1/4's (295-330). For the tweeters, I chose to use the new Dayton (Shielded) 1-1/8" Silk Dome (275-075). I was originally going to use a new pair of Apex Jr. tweeters I had laying around but after finding out they wouldn't work too well with the aluminum 5-1/4's, I ended up using the new Dayton "Shieldy's." (A big thanks goes out to Curt Campbell who took the time to design the crossover and even tried his best to make the Apex Jr. tweeter work with this project. His advice to use the Dayton shielded silk-dome tweeter instead was an excellent suggestion. Thanks again Curt).

For awhile I was stumped on how I wanted to design the over all look of this project but I became inspired one night while watching one of my favorite TV shows, "American Chopper." For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the show, it's basically about a hot tempered father along with his talented son that build custom choppers from the ground up. Since mostly everything on the show is fabricated from metal, it made me want to use metal in my speaker project. I figured what better way to show off the aluminum cones than to use aluminum accent strips. I ended up using pieces of ¾-inch wide aluminum channel that I found at The Home Depot. When it came time to name the speakers, I simply combined the two words Dayton and Aluminum and came up with "Daylum."