Hi Gents,
I have been thinking about making cast speaker cabinet for a number of years now, but have never taken the plunge and started with it. Now however I think it's time for some action, so I thought I would share my ideas and get your opinions on the matter.
To start out with, I want to build a pair of bookshelf speakers.
As a minimum I want to make a cast baffle and attach that to something like birch ply cabinet. That should be reasonably easy to do.
First prize would be to cast the entire enclosure (excluding the baffle) in one piece, then cast the baffle separately, then glue the cast baffle on afterwards.
I am not going to use concrete. Let's get that out of the way right away, so please don't tell me things about concrete enclosures.
The way I see it, I have a couple of options regarding the materials to use:
Resins: Polyurethane, Polyester, Epoxy
Fillers: Aluminium, steel, marble, granite, sand, cotton, mineral, etc.
The question is which combination to use? The cheapest option would be polyester with something like sand as a filler. The obvious problem with polyester is that it has a relatively high shrinkage rate, and using sand as a filler means that machining, sanding, etc will become nearly impossible after curing of the casting.
Therefore we are left pretty much with polyurethane or epoxy for the resin, and something other than sand for the filler.
Thoughts?
Kind Regards,
Ian.
I have been thinking about making cast speaker cabinet for a number of years now, but have never taken the plunge and started with it. Now however I think it's time for some action, so I thought I would share my ideas and get your opinions on the matter.
To start out with, I want to build a pair of bookshelf speakers.
As a minimum I want to make a cast baffle and attach that to something like birch ply cabinet. That should be reasonably easy to do.
First prize would be to cast the entire enclosure (excluding the baffle) in one piece, then cast the baffle separately, then glue the cast baffle on afterwards.
I am not going to use concrete. Let's get that out of the way right away, so please don't tell me things about concrete enclosures.
The way I see it, I have a couple of options regarding the materials to use:
Resins: Polyurethane, Polyester, Epoxy
Fillers: Aluminium, steel, marble, granite, sand, cotton, mineral, etc.
The question is which combination to use? The cheapest option would be polyester with something like sand as a filler. The obvious problem with polyester is that it has a relatively high shrinkage rate, and using sand as a filler means that machining, sanding, etc will become nearly impossible after curing of the casting.
Therefore we are left pretty much with polyurethane or epoxy for the resin, and something other than sand for the filler.
Thoughts?
Kind Regards,
Ian.
