- Enclosure Construction & Assembly -
In essence, this cabinet is a 15" external cube, and the
assembly can be done many different ways. For my
construction, I knew from the outset I was going to be
chamfering and veneering the cabinet, so I chose to make all
of the joints 45° miters with biscuits. From a purely technical
standpoint, this method is good because it provides a lot of
gluing surface area and therefore high joint strength. But,
this also allowed me to get smooth surfaces for the faces of
the cabinets without any need for sanding or filling end-grain
MDF. In addition, the lack of metal fasteners eliminated any
worries of destroying my expensive 45° router bit in the
chamfering process.
As I mentioned, the 2" thick front baffle is one of the unique
features of this cabinet, which was made by laminating
two pieces of 1" MDF together. But, before I did the final
glue-up, I cut and machined the two pieces separately.
The outer piece got a round cutout that would become the
recess for the driver; the inner piece got a cutout for the
woofer through-hole. Once these two were assembled, I
had a perfect driver recess with a minimum of fuss.
The divider was dadoed into the top, bottom, and side
panels of the cabinet, which allows it to not only separate
the airspace, but also provide substantial bracing. The grill
frame was cut with a Jasper Circle Jig out of 1" MDF, is an
approximately 1/2" wide ring, and has a 3/8" roundover on
the outside edge. This was painted black, grill cloth was
attached, and I added magnetic grill guides to allow it to
"stick" to the driver mounting hardware. Band-It Cherry
veneer with Maple accents was applied with standard
contact cement and finished with gloss polyurethane.
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