Much progress has been made, but also some lost.  Two steps forward…

The lamination is complete for the curved sides.  As this was the most time intensive phase, I felt like I should celebrate a victory, but have enough experience to know that my enclosure design brought about some awkward situations in the workshop.

The first order of business was to trim the overhang from the top, bottom, front, and back of the enclosure.  Given that there were no square sides in easy reach of a table saw fence, this was only going to be easy in my head.

My first attempt involved simply extending some wood out from the front and back of the horizontal braces/forms, and then slide this makeshift face along an over-sized fence.

Since the forms are square with what will be the front and back, it should have resulted in straight cuts. The plan was simple, elegant, and failed miserably.  

Freedom of motion on a table saw is a bad thing.  Ideally you want your workpiece to be secured in such a way that it can only move forward.  The problem with my plan was that I had to hold the enclosure firmly against the fence while sliding it forward.  Since the sides it is sliding on are curved, I also had to prevent rotation while pushing against the fence.  I was able to get the front trimmed without too much of an issue, but the back side attempt was when the woodworking gods lashed out.

The problem is that the saw blade cannot reach all the way through the back because, while laying on the table with the front and back at 90 degrees, the saw blade does not reach high enough.  Here was my first tactic, drawn up a little hastily:

In case you can’t tell, I tried setting the enclosure and saw blade at the same angle, then sliding the enclosure through.  Wrong!

Since my hands bristled when I asked them to go nearer to the saw blade, I had to push into the fence nearer the top of the enclosure, which made it hard to keep the bottom part firmly seated against the fence.  My cut was less than straight, despite curses, concentration that would cut through steel, and firm determination. Am I the only one who’s built an enclosure this way?  All the other attempts I’ve read about have seemed to go swimmingly.  I acknowledge that I’m not a real woodworker, but not every builder of curved speakers can be a professional, can they?

Anyway, I finally got smart, finished my crosscut sled, and adapted it for this job.

First I used it to trim top and bottom closer, so that routing flush wouldn’t require so much routing, then, after routing, I had a flat face and was able to easily flip the enclosure around and cut the front and back.  I used a digital angle gauge to make sure the angle of the blade always matched that of the enclosure.  I drew marks on the sled where I had the speaker lined up previously  so that I could get the correct depth when flipping it around.  Not having to maintain control over several axes and simply focusing on pushing was luxurious.

I did get a bit of tear-out and kicked myself for not using tape or something, so I’m repairing that as I type.  Also, The front has turned out to be wider than the original design.  Wide enough that I’m in danger of overshooting the width of my maple baffles if I trim back any more.  Because of this, I’m going to have to adjust the thickness of the front baffle, probably requiring a three part lamination when accounting for the maple.

Until next time, here are some more pictures…

Top and back

Front mostly finished

Close-up of lamination after cutting