DR 200 build, yep even the shameful pictures

[hilo4noff]

First attempt at cutting the difficult first pieces. Yeah the wood is old and uglier than me but it was headed for the burn pile anyway. Thought I'd see what shape my tools were in before i decided to go buy wood and such.

[hilo4noff]

So, it turns out that I thought that I had read somewhere on the forum that one could build drs using only a jigsaw. I would like to answer that by saying that one could hypothetically pass a bowling ball through their rectum too. After destroying much wood with my jig saw here is my advice: Before you get to a cut where you have to use the jigsaw do yourself a favor and make friends with that infernal tool. Practice cutting straight and curvy. Wasting a little plywood while breaking that horse is a lifesaver when it has to do what you want it to. Another thing on Jigsaws... any of my wood blades were chunking out pieces of ply with every other stroke. after adjusting the bite and speed up down forward and back, nothing would make a nice cut, so I ended up throwing in a metal cutting blade and that really cuts nice. No chipping out the top ply and the cut line is about the width of the pen I was using to mark the pieces.

Here's a picture of my reference line of the first two, that glue lubricates the boards pretty good when your trying to keep them still for the screwing! The line let me know that the pieces were in the right place to tighten down.

[hilo4noff]

Clamping becomes a problem right off the bat as I didn't budget for another truck load of clamps beyond my 6 irwin 16"ers so along the way you might see some goofy solutions to clamping.

Here was my solution to clamping all of these pieces for the glue to set up. I put them in pairs and a chunk of 4X4 seemed to be just the right height to support a 5 gallon bucket of water on top of each pair in addition to the screws clamping action. (for some reason I have more 5 gallon buckets than clamps)

[hilo4noff]

There aren't any pictures (sorry) of the next process of cutting out the 16 x 12" boards that attach to the throat horn assembly, because it was a distressing day of mass producing them only to find out that I had cut the end angles at exactly the wrong direction. So the line in the speaker's build directions that says something to the effect of "the supports are smaller on their outside face than on their inner face" is key. If you don't understand what that means do not proceed forward. And (of course) these cuts weren't in junk wood.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when you are aligning those pieces on the top of your newly constructed horns, this is the time to be patient and take your time. The squareness and consistent offset of this new piece to the throat horn assembly is about the most critical process to take your time on.

Oh, and my eyeballs assumed that those first pieces that I cut to form the horn were 1/2" thick. It turns out that they weren't and I had to do some thinking to figure out if they'd even work. After the fact.

[hilo4noff]

A bit on tools... I did build the sled Bill recommends, but after using the table saw for quite a few cuts, maybe two weeks later I found the blade digging in to my newly constructed apparatus on the back side of the blade. It got to the point (before I noticed it) that it was about to throw the whole sled at me if the blade had caught in it deep enough.

It turns out that when I figured out how in the heck to adjust the thing and got a wrench on one of the trunnion bolts (I think they're called) NONE of them were more than finger tight! I had never messed with them at all since I bought the saw at a yard sale. Finding online that there is a $20 kit that upgrades that stock piece to have horizontal adjusting set screws for alignment lets me know that this was a common corner cut in the manufacturing of the saws. I decided to just "adjust it" the old fashioned way. Clamping a steel ruler to the guide in the slot and just touching a tooth (from the side) at the front of the blade and then sliding the miter assembly to the back of the blade and performing the adjustment under the table to bring the blade as near perfectly parallel to the guide slot as you can get it. kick, pry, hammer or whatever, the motor/blade assembly (under the deck) in the direction needed to get that back saw blade tooth an identical micro distance from the measuring surface as the tooth on the front of the blade was.

Then all the bolts holding that blade/motor assembly to the deck got a proper torquing down. Here is picture up the wrong end of my table saw of the trunnion mount I'm talking about.

In the picture you can see two of the offending bolts that hold the whole lower assembly to the table.

[hilo4noff]

Here's my 23" compass, keep in mind that I'm married like most people and if I can make something that will work for what I need, I can save the financial sideways looks from my honey for the eminence speaker purchases and the important stuff. So with a couple of clamps and a junky 1x2 viola a perfect marking stick. What happened to the time when everyone had 3 of those old fashioned wooden yard sticks laying around?

[hilo4noff]

Here is my remedy for getting the warp out of the tops and bottoms because I got over zealous with the pl. Yes it does expand and it really did push the top and bottom front edges away from each other.

By the way, yes that is a sawsall blade and a tiny vice grip for a handle, call it a white trash Japanese pull saw

[hilo4noff]

The dirty picture, no matter how many projects I've done, I (like everyone else) get better with practice and I have ended up with one speaker cabinet that just gives me fits. It's that one that didn't quite get the alignment patience it deserved or it was getting dark out and the mosquitoes were getting me. But here in the picture you can see how when I put the throat horn sandwich in between the top and bottom for attachment the only way that I could get it all squared in the cabinet squaring device I concocted was to slide that damn thing near to center as I could, and just deal with the special cuts that one cabinet would require.

The line on the right bottom horn guide curve piece is where that piece originally should have ended but as the sandwich edge was another quarter inch over I had to re-cut a wider piece to compensate for that offset and maintain a full width screwing surface inside the access hole.

Then after much cussing and trips to the table saw during construction right there on the left hand side you can see where I had to add a piece of quarter inch down to nothing strip, to fill in where I couldn't trim anymore to make it square. Luckily this will work out, it has just taken the patience of job to work on this one speaker. If I didn't say it before... take your time with that alignment before the glue sets.

[hilo4noff]

How to make a well endowed robot life preserver... I was on the fence about whether to buy the foam baffles or try to make them. I don't have much experience with anything like this except to know that I have filled cracks with expanding foam. The thought did cross my mind to make a 1 inch thick form 7 inches tall and fill it with great stuff. Wait for it to dry and then cut out the 6.5" circles to make the baffles.

Then I spied the thick Styrofoam cooler on the shelf that the door to door steak salesman delivered those terrible overpriced steaks in, and wondered. Maybe that will work! It was thicker than the required inch but room for error is what I'm all about. And it turns out that my cutouts for the speaker ring are perfect to trace around to get the 6.5" outside diameter.

[hilo4noff]

So, I had my outside diameter and the choices in the garage for the inner diameter are numerous: disposable cup, spray paint lid, whatever. just know which side of the line you're shooting for after you trace it on there. Then, here is the surprising part... the sander works wonders on this stuff. Here I thought that I'd have the whole white balls flying apart that make up the styrofoam. NO, with just a little pressure the 60 grit sandpaper shapes the stuff like a sculptor's tool. So I turned the bottoms on the sander making the outer line disappear, then rough shaped it with the bare hacksaw blade. and then put the rough cut piece back on the 6.5" wood cutout in my hand and shaped the cone down as needed. This was so easy, It took maybe an hour to do all of them.

Then as I'm sanding I stacked up two more of the access cutouts supporting each side of one of my backer supports to make a 1" tall limbo pole to work them down to. Yay... this was way easier than I had imagined. I'm still amazed at how easy that was to do, and fun. I thought I'd be struggling to make those all day. I'm glad I didn't go buy a whole sheet of the stuff for this little needed material.

[hilo4noff]

Baffle shaping

[hilo4noff]

The dr200 melded tweeter support pic and the flat array pic. I'm only including these because I was confused as heck about just how the configuration was supposed to go reading the instructions and a picture is worth a thousand words. Oh and you'll also notice that on my front access hole support board there is a bevel that's not in the plans. It's not because I think I'm cool, it's because that was a 8' rip to the wrong angle for what I needed, so I put it aside as scrap to use somewhere else... this was the place.

And the plans call for maybe a 1/4 inch piece to possibly used on the melded array configuration so I thought that I'd wait until I got the melded arrays either bought or built to see how they are going to interact with the supports before I do anything else as far as construction goes. That's also why I'm slightly out of order on the construction plans. I'm needing to order piezo's and start on them but right now I have a few other irons in the fire that take priority. There's just never enough money available, when one needs it.

[hilo4noff]

Here are just some pictures before the baffles and then after the baffles and pvc parts are on back too. That really wasn't as hard as I thought either. They actually went on pretty quick, just had to do one per day with my clamping limitations and the time it took the pl to dry. I just didn't trust the hot glue to not come loose and become an insane rattle or vibration that I couldn't fix down the road.

[hilo4noff]

Ely while waiting for me to do something else, he guarded the pl drying in the sun on the one per day schedule, he's really excited about the whole project. As am I... This really has been fun and now I'm just in a weeks pause on construction for other responsibilities, but overall I'm really pleased with the progress. The dr's haven't been as hard as a "9" I don't believe, maybe the patience and reading the plans over about 8 times helped.

What else? I decided to go with the ac plywood to this point. Primarily because it was only a couple of bucks more than the regular grade and I wouldn't have to dig down ten deep in the pile to get to a decent one. For the sides I think I will be going with the Baltic birch as it's stronger. But before I head back to the lumber store I've also got to do some calculations on how much wood to buy to get the t48's underway.

Oh, I almost forgot... a 5' piece of 4" pvc will NOT get you all the way there if building (4) dr200s. When I ended up with two pieces left that were 1/2 an inch too short to finish off that day, you can imagine my disappointment at having to go back to the store for another piece... I thought I did the math correctly, but it appears that I didn't or the little bit of extra I left on each piece for final trimming busted my "pvc on hand" budget.

[J_Dunavin]

So, it turns out that I thought that I had read somewhere on the forum that one could build drs using only a jigsaw. I would like to answer that by saying that one could hypothetically pass a bowling ball through their rectum too.