... at about 2:00pm Australian Eastern Standard Time on 3 June. The delighted godfather (Hugh) has been informed! The project started ages ago when I bought the kit from Hugh in Feb 08. I imported the drivers from Madisound in Aug 08, but did not begin building the cabinets until last April.
The cabinets' outer panels are 25mm marine ply, and the front baffles are 44mm thick - laminated from selected 19mm construction ply and 25mm marine ply. Both the front baffle and the rear panel are 242mm wide, to preserve the correct interior dimensions. The front baffle is full length, just like Ron's. I'd independently thought about doing so, but Ron beat me to the punch of turning the idea into reality ... by a mere 10 months.
When building the front baffles, no. 20 biscuits were used around the edges of the mating surfaces to align the panels during the gluing process, then exterior grade PVA glue and strategically placed 35mm brass wood screws were used to hold it all together while the glue cured. No gaps were found when making the cutouts for the drivers and the bass port at the bottom of each front panel.
No. 20 biscuits were also used throughout the rest of the construction process.
The rear of each the bass driver cutouts was rounded over (combination of a 1/2" bit and a 1.0" bit - using a variable speed router at low speed and with an oversized sub-base for added stability) ... generally above and below the centre line, but not at the sides, where the cutouts almost touch the side panels.
I wish I'd been able to take photos of the reverse side of the front panels - the combined effect of using the 3 different roundover bits was positively H. R. Giger-ish to behold.
A router bit with a 10 degree chamfer and a cutting depth of 35mm (Aussie-made Carbi-Tool) was used to taper the face of the front baffle back to 230mm wide. The sides of the tops are rounded over with a 1/2'" roundover bit. I'm quite pleased with the overall effect.
The cabs were not veneered. I opted rather to make a virtue of using marine ply by applying a Red Cedar-tinted oiled finish, which nicely highlights the exposed edges. No photos as yet. Have to wait a week or two, after my wife and I buy a new digital camera!
The visible surfaces of the bass driver frames were blackened with Rust-Oleum Universal Advanced Formula Satin All-Surface Paint - in Satin Black. No primer was used or needed. And in Australia, at least, the Rust-Oleum paint is about 2/3rds the price of Hammerite, and its available from the local hardware store (Bunnings), whereas Hammerite would have to be freighted from Farnell Electronics in Sydney! I tried Ron's trick with a cardboard tube, but found the cardboard was too sloppy to hold its shape, so I had a local sheet metal shop make an open-seam (with 20mm overlap) tube out of 0.4mm galvanized roofing iron. A few tiny areas in the narrow trough around the woofer surround that the spray paint did not reach were touched up with a fine tipped artist's brush. It worked very well, and the Rust-Oleum paint sticks like the proverbial to a blanket!
The crossovers are in mini-cabinets, externally mounted on the backs of the main cabinets - easy to get at - and linked to the cabs' binding posts via flying leads. The series caps in the tweeter circuits are bypassed with 15nF 160v Vishay MKP1837's.
The sound? I'm delighted. Better bass, more detailed, more dynamic and less coloured than my 31 year old much-modified Pro9TL Kef B139-based transmission lines. More details to follow after they are broken in.
Lastly, here's my sincere thanks to Laurie, for designing these little beauties in the first place, and also for generously answering a number of emails (re more info, especially about placement of the carpet) during the last 2 years.
