BillFitzmaurice.info

Those look great! Very nice work.

Radian wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:33 amCould just be me, but I swear they sound a little better with the grills installed too:

After I put grills on my 2x6 I liked them better, too. I swear it made the +1 louder

Nice. Thanks for sharing.

Look at those beauties! Well done

I look forward to one of your high quality (sound) videos once they're all buttoned up for good and in service with subs and all.

Thanks for the good read

Thanks everyone.

So I re-wired the cabs today. Initially I used 14ga Tefzel wiring and although the stuff is amazing to work with (strips and solders beautifully), it was much too stiff for my taste once installed. Hence I dropped down to 16ga JSC which is significantly more flexible to work with.

What I arrived at so far:

That being said, while quite functional I'm not fully satisfied with them wired that way shown above, as the cables just float around inside there. I keep'em this way for now, but as I was patching everything together I was able to come up with what I feel might be an improvement. Routed as shown below uses the least possible amount of cable and would be much easier to affix the runs to the inside of the cab in an effort to reduce the chance of them working themselves loose over time:

The finished tweeter arrays from behind. Once again, follow the plans. I used 16 ga where Bill specs 22-24ga. Soldering the 16ga was a PITA because ultimately it's just too damn stiff to work with and runs the risk of putting too much heat into the tweeters. The only positive to come about from this was that the completed wiring significantly improved the stiffness of the array as it literally acts like trussing across the backs of the drivers. Sealed everything up with GE 510 silicone...good stuff there:
P.S. When trimming the tweeters, I do not recommend opening them up to remove the elements as I have read others doing in the past. Before machining, I sacrificed one by opening it up only to discover that the cones are indeed sealed around their periphery to the horn lenses from the factory. Not only does doing so run the risk of breaking off the piezo element from the cone (as a few others have run into), but that seal is critical for maintaining the freq response near LF cutoff of the horn. Worried about debris getting in there during trimming, I simply taped them up instead.

The finished crossover networks. I would have preferred to install them horizontally at the bottom of the cab, but they interfered with the hardware for the top hat so I ended up installing them vertical :

Luuurve the look of those things - mighty fine.

Question for Bill...What's the significance of using caulk around the woofers over a conventional thin, high quality Neoprene gasket tape?

Gasket tape is recommended in the plans, with caulk used only to fill leaks, if there are any.

Copy that.

Got done installing the foam padding this weekend, wired everything back up, and buttoned down the drivers one last time. Will be securing and sealing up the arrays tonight/tomorrow. Just about finished with this chapter of the project. Ordered new grills and will have to see how those fit. Fingers crossed.

Got the tweeters glued and screwed. Cured over night and have been running signal through them this morning.

One thing I noticed right away with the sound, they're holographic. Anyone else experience this? I mean, I'm hearing discernible layers of depth in the mixes...the kinda of Z-axis behavior I've experienced on Danley and Vandersteen stuff.. maybe not so "in-your face" obvious like them, but subtle and present no less... and that's simply using my Walkman or an iPad so far.

I haven't even broken out the good gear yet.