I ordered the supplies, including the Dayton DCS205-4 and the Dayton 100W plate amp. I went with the Dayton sub over the MCM because most of the supplies I needed were from Parts Express and the price would have been about the same after shipping if I ordered from both places.
My trip to Lowes was disappointing as they didn't seem to have any good plywood. I headed over to Menards and found arauco plywood for $20/sheet for 4x8. I really wanted Baltic Birch, but they only had it in 1/4" thickness.
On with the build... Most of the pictures were taken with my phone, so I apologize for the quality:
Started out by ripping all of the 17" wide pieces:
Doing some drawing. I wanted my access panel on the opposite side due to the corner that it will be placed in, so I reversed the plans.:
So, my sled was covering up the lines and I didn't think to mark my stop point ahead of time.
I was getting pretty good at drawing these lines the second time around.
Bring out the PL:
Made a little router jig to cut out the hole:
T-Nuts in with epoxy. Someone mixed the wrong size in at the hardware store, so I had to go back the next day to get another one.
Mistake number 2. This wasn't a case of measure twice, cut once. It was a case of check the plans twice, cut once.
More progress:
The end is in sight:
Looks like a conch shell:
Speaker terminal in:
Other side:
Time for the last panel:
I used screws to hold the panel on, but I figured a little extra weight couldn't hurt anything:
Driver mounted:
Gasket tape installed:
Access panel:
Test run:
The plan is to turn this into an end table to blend into the room. Last night, I put a birch veneer on the outside and I'm planning on 3" boards for trim to finish it off.
I'm hoping to be done with it sometime next week, so I'll post more pictures when it's done.
My impressions: Considering the size of the driver and enclosure, I'm really pleased so far and it has handled just about everything I've thrown at it. Would it be dominated by a THT? Of course, but for the levels that I usually listen to movies and music at, it sounds great. The only problem I have now is to fix all of the rattles in my house.
My house is a fairly open layout where the living room, dining room, and kitchen are open to each other, so I'm sure it's not as loud as it would be in a smaller room. Initially, I was running a full signal without a high-pass filter set and I could tell that it was reaching the limits on certain movies like Transformers 2 with the volume cranked. My receiver is old enough that it doesn't have high or low pass filters for the sub out, so I used an extra Behringer EQ to set a high pass filter around 35hz and haven't run into any "pushing the limits" issues. I'm still experimenting with the low pass filter, but it seems to work well around 60hz (hard to tell exactly what it's set to on the Dayton amp though).
When my tax return comes in, I'm going to step into the 21st century and replace my old trusty Kenwood receiver with something more modern.
