It feels great to hear your kind words. Thank you for your remarks.
It did take me a little over a year to complete these speakers and they do sound terrific. I am very grateful to Rick for his design skills and helpful emails.
Having good looking speakers is important to my wife and I love wood working. I did not have $25k available to sponsor the adoption of a pair of Sonus Faber Amati Homage Anniversario. I started looking for a design that was build around Seas Excel drivers and stumbled across Rick’s designs. I had never heard the Fountek ribbon tweeter before but I’d read good things about it. People would use words like “Sparkle” and “Shimmer” and I would say to myself WHAT? Seriously what does a “Sparkle” sound like? After listening, I now know what they meant and I love the sound.
It's not terribly tough to build rounded back speakers but finishing the speakers this way was very time consuming.
The enclosure volumes are pretty much identical to Rick’s original design. It took me a bit of effort and a excel spreadsheet to get the calculations sorted out.
I started with 1/2 round plywood cylinders that can be purchased here:
http://www.bd-international.com/Curved.htm I butt-jointed the sides to the rounded part and set them up so they taper down from front to back so the sidewalls are NOT parallel. I then applied several layers of flexible “wiggle wood” and built up the back/sides to be about one and a half inches thick.
The front baffle is 3" thick MDF. I used a skill saw to cut the angled facets like you see on Avalon speakers. I bought some nice leather on ebay for about $80 and took the baffles to a local upholstery shop where a guy sewed the corners for me for $20. I really like the leather covered baffle. It’s actually less work the veneer, it looks great, you don’t have to use speaker gaskets and it is not as reflective of sound as polished hardwood.
The top is made of ¾ inch thick Baltic birch and ¾ thick maple pieced together with ¼ inch strips of maple that was dyed black.
The plinth is 1 ½ inch thick High Density Polypropelene which is commonly used for cutting boards. I figured it would be pretty inert and if the cleaning lady bumped it with the vacuum it would not damage anything.
The finish was achieved by affixing several 4” wide strips of maple veneer alternating with ¼ strips of black inlay. Getting the veneer strips to match up with the one above and below it without a gap is a bit challenging as I cut my strips from a large sheet of veneer. If I were to do this again I would purchase wide edge-banding strips instead of trying to cut a sheet of normal veneer into perfect 4” strips.
The wood dye used was “Blood Red” manufactured by Solar-lux. I coated the enclosures with a dozen or more layers of deft semi-gloss lacquer. I plan to build the 4cc matching center channel soon. I love the way lacquer looks, but I will probably not use lacquer again. The fumes are AWFUL. I had to spray the speakers in my garage because my woodshop did not have adequate enough ventilation. The speakers weigh about 165 pounds each so it kind of challenging to move them around.
I need to wetsand a couple spots and I want to find some speaker spikes that look nice but after a year I had to start listening to them.
Thanks again,
Brent McDonald
