Aaaah, the big day... I was hoping to finish at least basic construction on this day
because it was the tuesday before Thanksgiving, and I wanted to show the speakers off to
my family who were coming to our apartment for the holiday.
The reflectors on the second speaker had mostly gone back to true because of all the
clamping pressure we put on them, so the first thing we did was glue the side on. This
still required a bit of muscle to get everything to line up, but it wasn't as impossible
as it was the last time we worked on it.
The next step was to cut the speaker holes. We tried a few things on a piece of scrap wood;
including freehand with the router(not very good), a Rotozip tool with a circle cutting
attachment (dull blade, floppy plastic attachment, no good), and freehand with a jigsaw (about
as bad as the router, but easier to see). I had a plan in the back of my head to make a
jig for the router, which is what we decided to do. I bought some machine screws, and used
a scrap piece of mdf. I drilled a hole in the mdf for the router bit to run through, and
added a cutout for the dust to escape. I attached the router to the jig with the machine
screws, and carefully measured from the edge of the router bit were to put a nail in the mdf
to act as a pivot point.
The router we were using was bought in the early 80's, used only to trim some countertop
laminate, and then left on the shelf until we picked it up 20 years later. It had a rather
blackened looking bit in it, which I assumed was just fine, not having ever really used a
router before. I had measured out the diameter of the larger drivers on the jig, using this
bit. When I started cutting the actual speaker baffles, the router literally spewed out smoke,
we had to set up cross ventilation using a couple fans to avoid being forced out of the
workshop. Each hole made it worse and worse, and we kept simply opening the windows more and
more. Thankfully the bit didn't completely give up the ghost before we were done with the
larger holes, because I wanted to have the same diameter for all the speaker holes.
Naturally this was all for naught, because I made the holes just slightly too narrow, I
suppose we should have checked this before we cut the centers out of the baffles. Oh well,
live and learn. Oh, and while mindlessly walking around the table, I caught the power cord
of the router with my foot, thus throwing it to the floor still attached to the jig I had
made. I broke some plastic bits off of the router's base, don't tell Travis' dad.
This was my day for breaking tools. I broke the countersink bit, used up a router bit,
etc.. I'm surprised that I'm still allowed in their shed, but I'll replace everything
but the shield for the router (I have no idea were to find a replacement for that...)
Needless to say, we didn't finish by the end of the day, but we got really far.
|
One *very* dead router bit
Looks like the file has claimed another victim...
You could say the old bit was running a bit hot.
We freehanded the inside cutouts, then later cleaned them up with the dremel.
Travis wearing his MDF halo.
Increasing the hole size with the dremel. Stupid Dave, Stupid.
More of the same. It didn't take much widening (less than a 1/16", but enough
not to let the speakers sit flush)
|
