White Oak Faced Powerful Passive Speakers

This is my third speaker project and completely different to the previous ones! This time I am going to make some big, powerful and nice looking monitors to go in my audio room!

I have some other projects on Instagram, please do check them out!

my etsy: ETSY SHOP I do custom orders here too. And sell some pf my projects!

I took on this challenge to make some new speakers and although it is a fairly simple build to do with hand tools, I love any excuse to use my CNC router. sorry...

MDF - Sourced form most home improvement stores

speakers - available form amazon. The ones I used were Bass Face.

Oak - I have a local supplier of exotic hardwoods and I intend to use some more exotic hardwoods in the future!

As always I jumped into Fusion 360 and quickly and easily came up with a design that I liked and used the available material I had very well.

I made some key design choices with these particular speakers as I wanted to try to use a little of my precious White Oak as possible so I decided to make the front a solid piece of oak and I used MDF for the rest of the enclosure. This wouldn't matter though as the box part would be painted white.

I used Fusion 360's built in CAM to generate some g code for all the parts I needed and then I was ready to cut them out on the CNC router.

Having CAM built into Fusion 360 allows a really nice and seamless workflow, don't have to use any other programs to process the files.

Then just load up some sheet material and let the machine do the hard work!

Once the parts are taken from the machine, the tabs that hold the parts in place need to be cut away with a hacksaw blade and then I used a small block plane to trip down the excess.

Some course sand paper on a flat board can also help this process.

I then glued up the main mdf boxes of the speakers taking extra care to make sure everything was straight.

I used a band clamp and masking tape as I find this the easiest way to glue up box shaped things.

After the glue up, I used the sandpaper on a board to cleanup the edges and get everything flush and smooth prior to primer painting

I glued the speakers in place on the front panel with some epoxy, I could't find the right screws so this will do until I get around to getting the right screws and doing this properly!

The speaker face could then be glued on and I took the time to mask off the mdf to stop it getting covered in glue prior to painting.

The whole thing could then be painted white, except the oak face. I used the bass ports covered in newspaper to seal up the holes in the back of the speakers.

I actually did this before painting of course but I ran all the edges of the speaker over my router table to give a nice faceted look to the speakers.

Next I wired up the speakers.

I wired up the speaker terminals to the back and installed the bass ports into the frame of the speakers. I also added tome rubber feet to the speakers at this point.

I masked off the painted mdf from the oak and then varnished the oak fronts.

Finished!!

The copper pipe stand is from an old project but I intend to use it in an upcoming project so stay tuned for that!!!