My center channel is finished and sounding great, its unfinished (not-painted) but i'll paint it when I paint these ones I'm working on now. So looking at the parts I had ordered when I had the high hopes of coming up with my own speaker design, I tried to find a decent proven design using the pieces I already had. I found mention of a design that uses the Dayton Classic 8" woofers and the Dayton 1 1/8" Silk Dome Tweeter in a MTM (Mid - Tweeter - Mid) configuration, I had all of these pieces so I started trying to find the details of this build. This was difficult to do as it was a fairly old design and no-one had built it recently. I eventually came across all the information I needed to start. This design uses quite a large cabinet (just under 4' high, 14" deep and 11" wide) so they need some space. They had a reputation of being able to go quite loud and produce a sufficient amount of bass to the extent that you didnt need a match them with a subwoofer for home theatre use. I like the sound of all that so I bought all the components for the crossover (this one was much more complex that the other one I had made).
The Components for the crossover came to about $100 for the pair.
The first crossover finished. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the configuration for this one. Also spent a lot more time securing everything down so nothing would come loose. I drilled holes through the plank and zip-tied the bigger/heavier components. The Air Core Inductor in the bottom left of the picture is pretty big and heavy so i wanted to make sure it stayed put. I Also used little connector pieces for the main input signal and all the out put signals, just to make it look a little nicer.
Here is one of my crossovers on the right compared to one I got from a set of speakers I took apart. The picture doesn't do the comparison justice.
Here is a picture of the front piece (the Baffle). It is two layers of 3/4" MDF, the outer piece is oversized to that when I finally mount it to the rest of the cabinet I can run a "flush mount" router bit all the way around and make it look perfect. Also the inner side of the baffle driver cut-outs for the woofers have been cut at 45 degrees to allow the speaker to "breath", apparently it makes a difference. The circle at the upper left of the photo is where the port tube will go. It is a 4" port so its large. I had to recess some holes for the t-nuts to go in for the driver mounting hardware. This all took a lot longer than you would think.
The rest of the cabinet went together pretty nicely, i just tried to take my time and make every cut as accurate as possible. I added some internal braces because this thing was going to be pounding pretty good and i wanted the cabinet to be solid.
This picture has the cab sitting on one of its sides. The other side and front arent on yet.
Sound testing it with the front baffle just clamped on and no port tube. Sounds pretty good as is but I am expecting it to sound much better once its ported, insulated, and glued and screwed. Nate has a really good Jimi Hendrix Blues record that we have been using to test the speakers with and it just sounds awesome. I cant wait to get these done and let them lose, but now that Dad is home I dont have the luxury of using his workshop till 2 am every weekend. They are pretty close to being done though so I should have them completed (not painted) in the next few weeks, unless school finals/presentations have anything to do with it.
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