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The Drake

The Drake
Design Goals
Driver & Amplifier Selection
Enclosure Design
Enclosure Assembly
Amp Configuration
Conclusion
Parts List
About the Designer
- Enclosure Construction & Assembly -

In essence, this cabinet is a 15" external cube, and the assembly can be done many different ways. For my construction, I knew from the outset I was going to be chamfering and veneering the cabinet, so I chose to make all of the joints 45° miters with biscuits. From a purely technical standpoint, this method is good because it provides a lot of gluing surface area and therefore high joint strength. But, this also allowed me to get smooth surfaces for the faces of the cabinets without any need for sanding or filling end-grain MDF. In addition, the lack of metal fasteners eliminated any worries of destroying my expensive 45° router bit in the chamfering process.

As I mentioned, the 2" thick front baffle is one of the unique features of this cabinet, which was made by laminating two pieces of 1" MDF together. But, before I did the final glue-up, I cut and machined the two pieces separately. The outer piece got a round cutout that would become the recess for the driver; the inner piece got a cutout for the woofer through-hole. Once these two were assembled, I had a perfect driver recess with a minimum of fuss. The divider was dadoed into the top, bottom, and side panels of the cabinet, which allows it to not only separate the airspace, but also provide substantial bracing. The grill frame was cut with a Jasper Circle Jig out of 1" MDF, is an approximately 1/2" wide ring, and has a 3/8" roundover on the outside edge. This was painted black, grill cloth was attached, and I added magnetic grill guides to allow it to "stick" to the driver mounting hardware. Band-It Cherry veneer with Maple accents was applied with standard contact cement and finished with gloss polyurethane.