The Olives

This Section Last Updated: 10-10-2005

This project started when i decided that i needed to treat my ears at work to much better sound than the crappy speakers that come with the standard computer now a days. I have had the Tang Band W3-881SD set aside for a few months with it in mind for a full range speaker setup. I at first planned on using a small plate amp for the sub then powering the satellites with a Sonic T-Amp. That is when i came across the Keiga 2.1 media amp sold at Madisound. It was the perfect fit.

This design came to me one day when i start to see some of the beautiful bowls my brother was turning on his lathe. I started imagining a speaker box with rounded corners then came to the conclusion that i wanted a sphere shaped box.

Of course turning a sphere on a lathe is a pretty big challenge. It takes special chisels to reach inside of the block of wood and hollow out the middle.

So i started thinking about it from another direction. What if i took a cube shaped box that has the hole already in it.

Then you just take the cube on the lathe and round off all the corners and you have a perfect void in the middle for the speaker.

I came up with this design using Visio. It seemed do-able. I build the walls out of two layers of 3/4 inch MDF so there would be enough wood to shave off the cube to make the sphere.

This shows my basic idea with the wood laid out. The top and front pieces are taken off to display the board arrangement.

So i mount up my box on the lathe and start knocking off the corners. I kept looking at it and come to realize that i might not have enough wood. The sphere that i drew on each side of the cube represented the largest diameter per side. I still had to connect the spheres in three dimensions. I don't want to start whittling away at the box and have it become un-stable and fly apart on the lathe. So i am back to the drawing board and hope to model this in some kind of 3D CAD program to verify that i have enough wood to make my sphere out of a box.

Project Sections: The Olives 1. Turn Baby Turn 2. Olive Tuning 3. Listening and Crossover Tweaking 4. Square vs. Round 5. Subwoofer 6. Olive Painting 7. Finished Project