Absolute Noob at wood working and am building Jim's Statement IIs

[silvia0073]

Welcome to the Statements family! I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do mine. It looks like everyone has given you great advice regarding building your cabinets. That's not my greatest strength so I'm glad others jumped in with answers.

I do need to clarify that in spite of you and others giving me all the credit for the Statements/Finalists/Anthology's, they have all been a collaboration between the real brains, Curt Campbell and myself with our good friend Wayne Wendall jumping in to help with voicing. They get all the credit for how these speakers sound. If it weren't for Curt, I'd just own empty cabinets with drivers piled around them. ;x(

We're looking forward to following your build!

Jim

Yes, can't forget about Curt and Wayne, Thanks guys! Can't wait to get everything together!

[silvia0073]

Make sure you follow first-time Statements builder tradition - put together the mid tunnels and glue them in and THEN REMEMBER you need to cut the recess for the tweeters. :W

Hey!! Don't jinx me! lol. Anyway, Yes, I have a router and a proper bit... the hard part is getting a square piece to begin with. I've started assembling, things seems to be going ok. Here are the photos so far. With 3 kids, wife, and work scratching at my heels for time, I can only put so many hours a day into this. Plus I'm over my budget and need more clamps so it's going to be slow going. I've decided on going with a PCB setup for the crossover. Will post photos of that process also, just going ghetto with a laser printer and home etching. First time working with etching PCB as well so if that fails miserably, I'll just go with wood and hot glue like everyone else.

Images not available

[Jim Holtz]

Thanks guys, I'll update as I go... hopefully there will be something useful for someone a long the way.

Welcome to the Statements family! I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do mine. It looks like everyone has given you great advice regarding building your cabinets. That's not my greatest strength so I'm glad others jumped in with answers.

I do need to clarify that in spite of you and others giving me all the credit for the Statements/Finalists/Anthology's, they have all been a collaboration between the real brains, Curt Campbell and myself with our good friend Wayne Wendall jumping in to help with voicing. They get all the credit for how these speakers sound. If it weren't for Curt, I'd just own empty cabinets with drivers piled around them. ;x(

We're looking forward to following your build!

Jim

[TEK]

If you have a router and a straight bit with a bearing, clamp the bad pieces onto the square ones and route off the excess.

And if you don't have one, you should probably go get one. Invaluable tool for DIY work.

[PMazz]

If you have a router and a straight bit with a bearing, clamp the bad pieces onto the square ones and route off the excess.

[kevinm]

Make sure you follow first-time Statements builder tradition - put together the mid tunnels and glue them in and THEN REMEMBER you need to cut the recess for the tweeters. :W

[silvia0073]

Thanks guys, I'll update as I go... hopefully there will be something useful for someone a long the way.

[---k---]

I agree with TEK.
My cuts are never dead on. If you look at some of my speakers closely, you'll see some bow or wow in the sides. Usually, clamping down tight can fix things. It will really depend on where you're over and under.

I normally use regular tightbond glue, but if you have some bigger gaps, you can use use a thick glue, like PL Premium Urethane http://www.loctiteproducts.com/p/pl_...n-Adhesive.htm it will fill and bridge small gaps. I've also used Bondo on a speaker or two to fix mistakes.

I always oversize my baffle, which is the last piece I glue down and then use a flush trim router bit to trim it up perfectly. Actually, I usually end up flush trimming all sides. My bigger problem usually is clamping square.

You'll figure it out. And the next speaker construction will be better than this one. and so on and so on.

[TEK]

Hi
First of all, thanks for sharing and to contributing to the forum - thats great and useful information and interesting reading usually is the result. At the same time I'm quite sure you will be able to get help resolving issues and problems that may occure when traveling down the often not so straight DIY path :-)

About your question, how square do your cuts habe to be...
That might depend, but a little bit off can usually be handlet quite well.
I would say that 1/8 of an inch is borderline, maybe a bit mutch. 1/32 of an inch is normally no problem.
What you will experience is that you get issues when you try to assemble the box as it does not nessesarly fit that well.
The more experienced here normally adds a bit of overhang to some edges (like 1/16) and uses a router to shave that off after the box has been glued together. When using that method you can have quite large deviations without getting any problem. When you have to sheets you want to be exactly equal you may use clamps and put them together and then use a router to remove any excess wood.
I also often apply several sheets together and by doing that in effect cuts out several speaker sides at once.

A good stearingquide for your saw is a importand investment.
Also, as you see, a router is a invaliable tool when doing this kind of work.

Oh, I forgot that -'if stiff goes wrong, you always have boundo (for outside) and scilicon (for inside)

[silvia0073]

Ok, I've been a long time browser of htguide, just never registered. You guys are an absolute treasure trove of knowledge! I've recently taken the plunge into diy and to start out, as a first ever project, built Jim's TriTrix speakers with the parts express kit. Kit being CNC'd, all the cuts were pretty much perfect so construction was a snap. Being new to wood working (new as in the only thing I've built out of wood from scratch was a simple table made up of 2x4's and a particle board top)... I can't get my cuts perfect... There's about 16th to 32nd of an inch off at one or two corners on some of the boards... by some miracle, some are square. This is done with a circular saw and a self made rip, no table saw. Is this going to be a huge problem come time for assembly? I try to get one board as close to square as I possibly can with my limited tools then rough cut the other pieces of similar dimensions and flush route them to at least get them to be the same dimensions. Here's a photo of what I have cut up so far, all that's left are the tunnels and braces. I know they may look decent in the photo but close inspections with a ruler will say otherwise. I'm not sure how accurate cuts needs to be for speaker cabinets but hopefully with my poor cuts but I hope it'll at least look like a box when I'm done. If there's any words of encouragement and or advice, I would appreciate them. I will continue to update as I progress if anyone's interested. After seeing all the absolutely awesome talent that had already built these speakers on here, I feel very unnecessary to show off my less than poor woodworking skills. Thanks in advance!