What have I done: A speaker

Hey there fellow Steemians, it's Rabbe. Hope you're having a good day so far.

In these modern times of automation and digitalization, there are still some crazy people who do things with their hands. One of those crazy people is me. Lately people have shown interest in what I do as a woodworker, so I thought I could present you a couple of my projects I've done on my spare time.

Today's post is something I made for my brother as a christmas present. He wanted a speaker for his computer, but couldn't find anything special so he came to me asking if I could make something he had in mind. I had free time and access to the university's workshop so of course I took the job.

My brother had an image of what he wanted in his mind, but I wanted some kinda picture of what I'm doing so he scribbled something with good ol' MS Paint. Another day in the life of a joiner, poor drawings and instructions that say "do what you want".

Anyway, after a few questions for clarification, I started the project. My brother had a U-shape planned for the speaker, so that narrowed the range of usable materials since doing tight curves with wood isn't the easiest task out there. However, I was lucky enough to have some very special birch veneer leftovers from a project we did for a big finnish plywood manufacturer. The stuff is only 0.3 millimeters thick, which is basically the thickness of two layers of copying paper. This kind of material is not something you get from the local hardware store since it's so hard to produce.

Of course in order to make a certain shape for the speaker, I first had to make a mold.

Here you can see the mold as well as the material I chose to use. Since the veneers are so thin, the birch it's made from needs to be completely free of knots and defects. This in turn means the end product looks quite good.

Next up was the hardest part, gluing the sheets together. Getting the sheets to bend to the shape was easy, since the thickness of the individual veneer was so small. The difficult task was to keep the sheets together throughout the whole shape. That's why I had to use a few thousand clamps. Well, at least it felt like it when I was tightening them. Originally I was going to use a vacuum press, but it lacked the force to properly press the sheets together so I decided to go old school.

I didn't have the time to make a counterpart for the mold, so I decided to use a metal sheet to divide the pressure evenly onto the whole surface. It also ensured that there were no gaps left between the veneer sheets.

The next day I was anxious to see what I had come up with. It's almost like opening presents since you can't really be sure what's going on under there until you get to open up the whole system.

Success! The shape was pretty much what I wanted and it kept the desired shape after opening up the mold. I think this one really shows how thin the veneers are, there are 5 layers with glue and it still turned out this thin.

Next step was to trim all excess material and give the speaker's body it's final shape. I also made the front panel and the sides from the same birch veneer.

It's beginning to look like something. However, we still need a few steps before we can call it finished.

Okay so: a delicate sanding throughout, a few holes on the front panel, a maintenance hatch on the bottom in case something breaks, a change of scenery and here we are.
Ignore the spooky hand.

All that was left for me at this point was surface finishing with the color my brother had chosen. He also wanted to have a volume knob on the front panel, so I turned one from a piece of mahogany I had lying around at home.

After that it was just down to doing the wiring and attaching the speakers to the front panel. This is how the final product looks:

I wasn't quite sure about the color on the final product, but my brother was so satisfied that it didn't really matter. All in all, a very fun project where I got to apply some new techniques and a bit of engineer's problem solving.

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That's it for today guys, hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know if you got some projects going on that you'd like to share with the rest of us. Until next time. Peace. -R