Owen's Dual UXL-18 Sealed Build

Prof. said:

Deep bass sound waves can travel great distances, but it's not a linear spread of sound..
Your neighbour 5' away may not feel or hear anything, but the guy three doors down the road might have his teeth rattling or his eardrums bouncing!
There's no guarantee of who will be affected by it..

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We'll just have to see who the unlucky neighbour is in this case, I guess! :rofl:

Tonto said:

Owen, it's easy to get the center. Cut some small spacers to fill the gap created by the original cut. When you clamp it, it will be dead center. Just tap a nail through the cut out into the backer board. Clamp it together before nailing of course! You should be able to shave off the right amount. Don't worry about the spacers, just cut right through them. How much do you need to trim?

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Thanks Tonto, I had a few minutes to myself last night, and I took a look at doing it this way. I think I can make it work, but the baffle is small enough that I can't fit clamps on the corners and get the router around. I do have a solution, I think.

I mocked up a board with the circular cutout on it, and played with spacing. Once I thought it was feasible, I centered the cutout and screwed it into the board, and put a couple of clamps on each end. Here's where it's going to get tricky... Since I'll have to remove the clamps as I go around those corners, I'm going to try to tape the board in place as a secondary method of securing it. If that won't hold without some wiggle until I can get the clamps back on, then I'll just have to screw into the backside of the baffle. I still have to measure my distance and add a new pivot hole to my template. I should get this all done over the weekend, and I'll post some pics on Monday.

I'm still alive, and so is this project. It's been a few weeks of intermittent activity due to flippin' COLD weather and kid stuff, but I've slowly chipped away at things to the point where I feel like I can post again.

I managed to slightly enlarge the woofer cutouts successfully by reinserting the previous plug, screwed to a long board that I clamped into position on the baffle (thanks, @Tonto!). This, after very careful measuring, gave me my exact centre again, and let me use the router jig to go around and take an incremental amount off the inside. It worked very well, actually. To save time and trouble, I picked up a flush trim bit and used it to copy the cutout to the second baffle. It was my first time using one and I was quite impressed.





Once I was happy with the fit of both the inner and outer baffles, I glued them together and used the stack of unbuilt enclosure panels to weigh them down because I thought this would be more uniform pressure than I'd get with clamps.





Next I mocked up a test fit of the first enclosure to check my cuts, confirm assembly order, and to measure for some bracing. I had some vague plans for bracing, but when I saw the actual dimensions I have to work with I scrapped them and just made some on-the-fly decisions. The sides will have 3 cross braces, top to bottom will have 2, and the piece that is in place in the picture below is how the rear panel ties in to one of the 3 lateral cross pieces. I think this should do the trick when I get it all set up. I didn't have zipties handy, so I made some handles for the woofer out of twine. I also decided to bail out on the T-nuts and threaded inserts, and to stick with screws, so I started gluing blocks on to the back of the inner baffle to give some more depth to bite into.







I went to see if HD carried any nice looking black cap head screws, which they didn't. I did see these though, which look interesting, assuming the integrated washer head is the right size for the woofer basket. If I go with these I might shoot them with a bit of black paint before sinking them. Any thoughts?

"When it rains it pours", I guess. I had some more time to put in work on the first cabinet, and glued up a second side (the top, in addition to a side, actually) as well as the remaining two "side to side" braces (sitting vertically now for glue-up. The side panel that is on top is just resting there to keep the 2 braces stable and square while they are glued at the "bottom" only. If I can continue to get a little in over the next few days I should be able to finish the first one by the weekend. But now that I just went and said that, and stated a date, guess what's going to happen...? LOL

And I now feel like I've accomplished something. Enclosure 1 is assembled, and came out not too badly. There were definitely mistakes made, but nothing too critical. The first half of the enclosure came together REALLY nicely and I was astonished at how tight my edges and corners were joining up. I squared up and glued in my last braces, and was pretty happy with how they worked out.



The first noticeable mistake came when I was test fitting the final panels, and - oops! - I had measured and cut the braces for an inset panel instead of a panel that would be attached to the outside of the adjoining walls. No big deal, I was off by exactly a panel width, so I added some spacers to the braces. You can see the blocks up on top. Now it's a nice tight fit.



My next mistake was the order I chose to assemble. Basically at this point I was left with 2 side panels and the baffle to go together in one step (because of the stepped baffle I couldn't slide it in very well if 3 sides were closed in). I thought I could manage it not too badly with the 7 long clamps I had, but I really should have had 3 more. I made due, and got strategic about where clamps went, and then I used weight on the baffle when I ran out. I could have used a couple more to help pull a few corners into square a touch better, but it came out OK.



The final result from this morning's unclamping. It's not the prettiest, but it's solid. It will need a good amount of filling and sanding before I can think about finishing it, but at least I do feel like I got a good seal. Almost all of the interior corners had a fair bit of squeezeout, which I was able to run a finger over to complete most edges. I'll probably run a quick bead of something over a few of the final joints internally just to be safe.



And now I get to do it all over again! With the next one I'm going to start with the baffle, and work my way around a side or 2 at a time. That should help me to keep things tight, and not leave me gluing in 3 dimensions at a time. I'll probably just post the final when the next one is completed, since it will be more of the same.

OK, I've been shamefully neglectful of both this project and this thread, but I have made some progress since my last posts. The big holdup was that I was waiting for my new flush trim bit to come from China. It's a $6.00 Amazon special, and as you can see, it really is "trump card quality". But more to the point, it worked, and as far as I'm concerned it worked pretty well. I had a few wiggles, but overall didn't make too big of a mess with it.





Next I moved on to filling. I wanted to try something other than the Dap drywall compound I had used before, so I picked up a small tub of Elmer's ProBond Max wood filler. I think it would be nice when working with large areas or gaps, but since it seems to be textured, it isn't great for the tiny gaps I had here. I made it work, and there was only one area that needed buildup. At least it sands well.





Next, I wanted to get moving with the details on the enclosures. I had planned to do a large chamfer around the top of each box. When the time came to get to work, the chamfer bit I had wasn't very big, but I figured I could always get a bigger one and go over it later if I wanted. I ended up liking the profile as-is, so things were going great... until I realized that I had just done the SIDES of the enclosures instead of the TOPS. I had them with sides up after sanding, and hadn't remembered to check the orientation I was so gung-ho to start using the router. D'OH! Well, it just meant that now all corners would be subject to the chamfer treatment. Not the end of the world. My helper for the afternoon seemed to think they were still a good home for his dinos.