Fostex Open Baffle Speaker Project Complete!

I had "finished" these open baffle speakers some time ago.  But it wasn't until last week that I was able to rub out the lacquer finish, install the Fostex FE206e full range drivers, and power them up.

Overall I am very happy.  I took the new speakers home, and switched them with a pair of Snell Type K/IIIs I had as my main left/right speakers.

Ok - here's my miter secret.

Ok everybody - I am going to reveal a secret technique for perfect miters, which I have devised.  I have searched around a while on line, and couldn't find any examples of this technique in use.  I also asked several professional cabinet makers about how they accomplish perfect miters, and most just said "I don't".  The others offered up ideas that looked good on paper, but had failed me in practice.

So, here it is, my big secret.  I am re-publishing a post I made on the Boston Reefers DIY Forum.

Mitered doors and other "external" miter joints: made to fail?

Illustrated Mitered Door Frame

Last week, a customer asked me to outfit his aquarium stand with mitered doors.  For the uninitiated, a mitered door is a door with a frame made from two vertical "stiles" and two horizontal "rails", joined at the corners with miter joints.  Miters are diagonal cuts in the end of a board - usually cut at 45 degrees - allowing two mitered boards to meet at the ends and form a 90 degree corner (see pic at left).

People like mitered door frames, I suspect, because they look cool.  They're also hard to make, and may therefore be a sign of the cabinet-maker's skill. 

Ask a cabinet maker, however, and he or she may well tell you to NEVER buy or make a mitered door.  See this link for responses to the "miter question" on Woodweb.com.  The reason isn't just because of how hard it is to find a well-made mitered door frame.  It's because the miter joint is a natural candidate for opening over time, due to the way wood moves.

Klipsch Heresy Rebuild

Klipsch.  The name is well known among audiophiles, for it's the name of one of the greatest U.S. speaker design companies ever known.  The Company made its name on four classic speaker models  - La Scala, Heresy, Cornwall, and Klipschorn - and the signature horn-loaded tweeters and mid-range drivers used in those models. 

These four "heritage" designs made their debuts in the early 1960's, and the designs haven't changed much since.  And while Klipsch is now a mass-market company, with manufacturing operations in China, they still offer these four flagship speakers for sale to discriminating listeners.  Unlike other Klipsch-branded speakers, the Heresy, La Scala, Cornwall, and Klipschorn are made to order in Klipsch's original plant, located in Hope, Arkansas. 

The Heresy is the smallest of the four speakers, sporting a 12" woofer, a mid-range horn, and a tweeter horn.  If you want Klipsch to make you a pair of Heresies today, it'll set you back around $1,500. 

Essential Table Saw Tune-Up

Tuning the table saw: it's something my friend Dave - a carpenter - never really did.  But over my last ten months of woodworking, I've come to realize how important it is when making furniture.  That's because, unlike in carpentry, where poorly-fitting joints can be saved by screws, nails, and shims, perfect angles are critical to good furniture.

I use my table saw for many joinery operations.  Not only do I use my table saw to rip stock (after jointing and planing the other three faces), it's also my go-to choice for cutting square ends and miters.  the table saw excels at these tasks because it's possible to tune the saw to within 1/100 of a degree of accuracy, unlike other power tools, such as the miter saw (the best of which, by the way, could never be relied upon to cut miters for furniture). 

Wait...Paint?!?!?

I am taking the plunge and painting some furniture.  I had to do it.  I know my "rep" (such as it is) as a furniture maker may suffer as a result, but I was left with no choice. 

Here's the thing:  I have been trying to get a good black finish on my aquarium stands for a few months now.  I also have a few striped table tops that almost surely would look best with black bases.  But no matter what I try, I can't get a good black finish that goes on easily without re-work. 

My Bamboo Chest, in its Home

I recently got some pictures from my clients, of a bamboo chest I made for them around Christmas time.  Here they are:

The All-Important Right Angle

A great jig for fast, square frames

Everybody knows that 90-degree right angles are a big part of architecture, furniture, and design.  But many have never experienced the difficult process of trying to make a perfect right angle.  No, I'm not talking about drawing one on a page, I'm talking about making a right angle out of something.  Doing that is no mean feat.  In fact, a good right angle is both an essential, and difficult-to-achieve, fundamental of quality furniture making.  When I first began making furniture, I thought I could rely on the accuracy of my power tools to achieve good right angles.  Almost a year later, I'm coming to terms with the fact that this is not a good way to make an accurate right angle.

But accuracy isn't the only imperative in a wood shop: speed is of equal importance.  Making accurate right angles quickly is essential to making a living in wood. 

A new outfeed table...

Outfeed support: essential for crosscuts

For some time now, it's been clear that my over-stuffed studio needs a re-design.  Among the many changes due is the building of outfeed tables for my table saws (we have a 10" 1.75HP contractor saw and a 12" 5HP cabinet saw).  Outfeed tables are important for certain table saw operations, most notably ripping long stock, and crosscutting wide stock.  The inability to crosscut 4' x 8' plywood sheets has forced me to use my circular saw...never a good option for furniture building, even when using Festool's over-hyped guide rails (which I do use, reluctantly). 

But life goes on, and making an income has taken the front seat and put my improvement project on hold.  To that end, I have been making aquarium stands for the local aquarium installer/retailer. 

But when one of my stand went horribly wrong, I got a chance to take a step in the right direction and install an outfeed table for my 12" cabinet saw. 

DIY Open Baffle Speaker Project

Readers of this blog may remember a project I began a few months ago: my first loudspeaker.  Progress has been slow; as a personal project I have to fit in the work when I don't have anything better to do.  But my first pair of speakers is almost finished, and the project represents more than one "first" for me:

Lacquer: one tough cookie
My open baffle speakers use one Fostex FE207E 8" full-range driver in each tower, and are made from purple heart and curly maple.  Since I used such nice lumber for the project, I wanted to finish the baffles in the glossiest, deepest finish possible.  And that means good ole lacquer: the smelly, flammable, brain cell - killing gloss finish of yesteryear.  Lacquer is fast-drying, thick, and volatile, making its application a challenge.  But the result - a glossy, rich finish - is impossible to replicate.  I brushed on four coats of lacquer before rubbing it out.  But before I rubbed it out, I had to wait a full ten days after the last coat.  That's ten days after the lacquer was hard to the touch.  But lacquer isn't fully hardened until at least seven days after application, and a gloss finish isn't possible until full hardness is reached.

New Pages on the Blog

purple heart & mixed hardwood coffee table, made 12/20/2010

Blogger now offers "Pages" on its blogs.  This is an excellent feature of Blogger, as it allows users to easily create static pages and link to them from a navigation menu generated automatically by Blogger.  This can make a blog act much like a website.  Unlike most website hosting platforms, however, a Blogger blog is free.

I have made use of the new pages feature by creating two new pages: "Tools of the Trade" and "Custom Commissions".

"Tools of the Trade" is a description of the "big" tools we have in our shop, so visitors can get a sense of how furniture is made, and see for themselves the difference between furniture-making tools, and the tools used by a carpenter who comes to your house.

Have You Heard of a Manta Board?

I find few things in life more gratifying than discovery: learning, exploring, and even creating exciting new vistas.  It's no lofty concept: the new is always presenting itself to us.  Take, for example, a recent favor I did for my friend, an aquatic biologist: helping him create a manta board.

What's a manta board?  It's for scuba diving, of course!  But when my friend first asked me to help him make a manta board, for an upcoming trip to Haiti's coral reef, I thought he wanted it to scare predators (or attract them...).

Re-Saw Magic

By replacing the motor, I can re-saw 12" of maple

The band saw is regarded by many woodworkers as "the most important saw in the shop", due in no small part its unique capabilities.  Band saws can cut curves - unlike a table saw, chop saw, or hand saw - and with a thinner kerf than a router, and with no need for a special fence or guides.  Band saws can also perform the initial milling of raw timber: turning a tree trunk into boards.  And band saws can "re-saw".

Re-sawing is splitting a board in two...the hard way.  Take a look at the picture on the left and you'll see what I mean.  What you see in that pic is a piece of 3" thick hard curly maple, standing on edge roughly 12" high, and 20" long.  You also see a re-sawed slice.  The slice is 1/16" thick, and was peeled off of the block of maple on my band saw.

Unlike a table saw's disc-shaped blade, a band saw blade is a giant hoop, drawn tight between two cast-iron wheels.  And unlike a basic, 10" table saw blade, which can get bogged down trying to cut through 3" of hard maple, even a small band saw can easily go through 6" or 7" of the same hardwood.

Tools of the Trade

Four Belt sanders?  Yes, for Wine Wings

There are thousands of traditional and modern tools used in woodworking.  For many trained and formally educated woodworkers, traditional hand tools are sufficient to build nearly any piece of furniture.  But for those of us who want to spend more time bringing designs to life than training their muscle memory to wield hand tools perfectly, modern power tools represent the road to happiness.  Power tools provide unmatched accuracy in the hands of woodworkers-in-training.  They can also get the job done faster and better than hand tools in many applications.  This can be important to clients, keeping the time it takes to complete a project (and henceforth, costs) to a minimum.

Band Saw Upgrade: From light-duty to medium duty

I haven't yet learned much about the band saw, which is considered by many furniture-makers to be "the most important saw in the shop".  Still, I do own a band saw: I was given one by a friend a few months ago.  It languished in storage until yesterday, when I bit the bullet and pulled it out in order to cut a curve in a thick lamination of Purple Heart and Maple.

My band saw, a Delta 14" from 1990, is low-powered by any standard of stationary (floor-standing) band saw.  Its motor was rated at only 1/2 HP.  By comparison, Delta's current 14" band saw has a 3/4 HP motor, which is still small, but appropriate for a 14" band saw, which is the smallest of the floor-standing saws.  Strangely, the previous owner of the saw had installed a riser block, which increases the vertical capacity of the saw by 5 inches.  I say this is strange because with a 1/2 HP motor no blade would be able to cut through stock as thick as the maximum capacity of a regular 14" band saw, let alone as thick as the riser block allows.    

Sketchup v. Sketchup Pro v. AutoCad 2011

For a couple of months now, I have been using the free version of Google's Sketchup 3D modeling software to design my furniture.  It was easy to learn (once I bought a instructional book), but in just a few weeks I ran up against the free version's major limitation: it can't show and hide elements of the drawing.  So I decided to upgrade.  But to which CAD software?  I chose to take a look at Sketchup Pro ($400 retail) and AutoCad 2011 for Mac ($4,000 retail, or $400 for students). 

Downloading a free trial of AutoCad was easy enough.  And once I bought an instructional book on mastering AutoCad, learning it was also easy.  As for Sketchup Pro, I wasn't able to find a trial, so I used a friend's computer which had Sketchup Pro 7.1 installed.  So, how did Sketchup Pro compare to AutoCad 2011 for Mac?  Read on...

Stripe Coffee Table

Just before Christmas, I built a simple coffee table for my girlfriend's mother.  The top was made from a board of scrap I had made up a month previous, and the leg assembly was of birch, stained black and with a waterborne urethane topcoat.  I didn't have time to take pics of the building process, but here are pics of the finished piece (click "read more" below for more pics)

"Melting Clocks" coffee table project

Among the many projects I have going on at any given time is one involving two striped table tops, which I made from off-cut scrap from my early Wine Wing development days.  I had made two identical table tops (see "rubbing out a satin finish"), plus one more long one.  The long one was made into a coffee table for my girlfriend's mother (pics coming soon!), and one of the other two tables was made into a small end table. 


I had planned to give the end table to my parents for Christmas, but my design left much to be desired.  Compared to the coffee table I gave to my putative mother-in-law, the end table looked under-designed and amateurish.  So I decided to make a coffee table for my parents, using both striped tops.  My plan was to cut the tops and create a draping effect over the coffee table, as if the two striped tops were cloths laid out over the table's top, as in the sketch at the top of this post.

Bamboo Chest: Finished Pics

Here are some pics of the completed four-drawer chest (see my recent blog posts for history on this project).  It is made from 3/4" 3-ply bamboo plywood and MDF.  The tall drawers slide out from their flush-mounted resting places, revealing shelves for DVDs and CDs.  Click "more" to see whole post and more pics (below)

Finshing Techniques: Oil ON TOP OF urethane?

A project that began last week is almost finished.  The four-drawer chest, made of bamboo plywood, was commissioned by a friend.  As of this writing - the night before the chest is due to be picked up from my Allston studio - the chest is curing after being brushed one last time with super-fine, 00000 steel wool.