This week, I will be talking about the speaker I made as my final project in period 3. I’ll explain how I made the project and my overall thoughts on the piece.
First, we created a rough draft that will be the basic design for the speaker. For my rough draft, I drew a hexagon shaped speaker with a stand. Unfortunately, some ideas never followed through due to time restraints. Once we had our rough draft, we chose our wood. I ended up going with an assortment of different hardwood for the front, and pine for the middle and back. Unfortunately, I need to change my design because there weren’t enough pieces. After choosing the wood, I found two other classmates and started gluing our pieces.
While we waited for the glue to dry, another classmate and I began working on the back. Since we didn’t have enough hardwood, we used pine. With the squad piece of pine in hand, we then cut it in half for my classmate and I. On my own, I then used the table saw and miter saw to get the wood to the correct dimensions. I then spent a larger chunk of time at the planer, getting the back to a reasonable size.
After my back was fully cut to size, I began to cut the strips I would be using for the interior and middle. Since I had some leftover hardwood after squaring the piece, I used strips of hardwood the two most visible edges. Once again, my design changed at this point. The strips of the hardwood weren’t long enough, so my hexagon design turned into an octagon. At this point a break from the middle to cut the speaker holes in my front. Once I located the center of my holes, we moved to the drill press to make them. From this point I went to the router table beside it, to make the edges of the recently cut hole smooth. With a fully completed front, I turned my attention back to the middle. When I had my two strips of hardwood, I then moved to the band saw to cut the rest of the middle. The most challenging part when making the middle was definitely cutting some of the smaller pieces. After cutting the exterior of the middle, I began cutting the pieces for interior channels. First, I cut out the pieces that would allow my phone to rest in the speaker without falling through it. This process required three parts, being two rectangles and an L shaped piece. The reason for the excessive amount of material was the need for a small gap so the sound could reach the channels below it. From that point, I began working of the rest of the interior. To make sure I wouldn’t interfere with any of the holes, I traced them using the front as a reference.
Once I had the basic layout of my middle, I started the gluing process. This step obviously entails the use of clamps, the wooden strips, back, and glue. The reason I chose to clamp each piece individually, was the fear of having several interior pieces move, ruining the channels. However, the time restraint caught up with me, and I clamped everything together, back, middle, and front, even though pieces were still drying. Once the piece was strong enough not to fall apart, I took it to the miter saw and table saw to square it. After the piece was squared, I used the miter saw to cut the angles, creating the final shape of the speaker. When the final shape was finally cut, I moved back to the router table so I could have a nice edge all around my piece. I then began the long tedious process of sanding. After sanding with the 400 grit sandpaper, I applied the poly using a brush. After applying two coats of poly and sanding with the 900 and 100 grit sandpaper, I applied the wax using a paper towel. Finally, I used another piece of paper towel to buff the piece. At that point, the speaker was fully assembled.
Overall, I’m really proud of my speaker. I used all the skills I learned over the year and I felt this was a good summative. I think the speaker looks good and look forward to using it. In the end, the speaker was a good way to wrap up the semester. I hope to make something again in the near furture.