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
|
|