Home theatre in mesquite

[jackgiff]

My wife and I are building a new house, and will need new speakers for the home theatre. We both fell in love with mesquite furniture a few months ago, so it seemed natural for me to try making the cabinets from mesquite. My first purchase was for just enough wood to build the front center cabinet. Here are pictures of the raw wood and the almost finished project. It only lacks a few more coats of oil over the next couple weeks. Now since it worked out OK, I have the wood for the L & R cabinets as well. The center uses a Trusonic 80FR, while the L & R will use 120FR's and RT-1 tweeters. If those go well, I will buy wood for the rears, which will be much larger, and will use 150FR's, 80FR's and 5KT's. The rears will also serve as a two way system for just music. The killer system will be in another room, and will use JBL's as the speakers. Can't wait to live there.

[jackgiff]

The wood came from a mesquite lumber yard in Tumacacori, Arizona. It was imported from an old reservoir in Mexico, and cut and dried at the lumber yard. Being rough cut, it took lots of sanding, but at least there was no worry about sanding through a layer of veneer. And it is full of cracks, so needs filling with either polyester resin or epoxy. I have seen furniture with the fill being turquoise in polyester, but black seemed much more acceptable for speakers.
Here are a few more shots of the progress as this cabinet came together.

[jackgiff]

or at least the wood for it.

[pelly3s]

I love the Trusonics stuff. I was thinking about building some boxes like that but I just never get the time to

[yggdrasil]

WOW - that's really beautiul.


Hope they will hold together over time as using unprocessed lumber will keep all the tension in the material.

You could try to cut the lumber into 2-4" wide lengths. Then lay them side by side, turninge every other 180 degrees and then finally glue them together. This will cancel a lot of the tension in the material. (Hope this disaster of an explanation is understandable).

Good look.

[Titanium Dome]

Those look good, and quite unique!

Back in 1970 my buddy and I built some speakers out of well-aged, solid white oak. The wood was a mother to work, though his neighbor had a complete woodworking shop in the basement which made the job considerably easier. We were by no means expert speaker builders, but did a good job of cabinet making. They looked great.

The down side was that they didn't sound all that great, because at that young age (19), we hadn't a clue about cabinet resonances, bracing, tuning, dampening, appropriate box volume, etc. Also, the solid wood tended to have weird harmonics and it did, as yggdrasil suggests, want to do its own thing shape-wise over time.

So, I'm really curious about the inside story of your mesquite cabinets: how they're braced, insulated, how you chose the dimensions, etc.

[jackgiff]

I sent an 80FR and a 120FR to Gordon Waters, who tested them to determine the T/S parameters. It was a simple matter of chosing whether the cabinet should be sealed or vented. The same performance could be had from a sealed cabinet of about .9 cubic feet as from a vented cabinet of 2.5 cubic feet. Since this was the center channel where it will only be reproducing sound within the voice range, and size matters, I chose sealed. The LxWxD dimensions were essentially what the wood allowed me to build. And since the wood has cracks, it would look strange to cut it into strips, alternate them, and glue them back together. I think it will outlast me, and then it needn't worry me any longer whether it warps. If it warps before I go, it will be easy to rebuild.

For the larger rear cabinets, it will be pretty much impossible to get wood with wide enough heartwood to build a large cabinet. Then it will be necessary to cut and glue strips together, but why use that technique when it isn't really required?

The JBL's for the real listening system are going to be built in L200 cabinets, and will most likely be two ways in accordance with Zilch's Quick and Dirty 4430 thread.

Here are a couple pix of the inside. The corners are glued and screwed using 1x1 pieces of mesquite, the speaker baffle is glued into the slots cut into the cabinet sides, and the inside is sealed with RTV, and of course all cracks that come through the wood are sealed on the inside to keep the epoxy from running through. It is filled with Acousta-Stuf polyfill which was purchased at Parts Express.

[JBLROCKS]

Niiiiiiiiice!!!!!!

[jackgiff]

Finally finished the left and right front speakers. They have Trusonic 120FR's and RT-1 tweeters. Now is the time to decide whether I really want to build a large pair for the rears. If so, they would be used for two channel music when the HT is not being used. By the way, the redwood coffee table visible in the lower left corner of the first picture is the slab the first smaller cabinet was laying on when it's pix were taken a few months ago.

[Ken Pachkowsky]

They look great...

Ken

[doucanoe]

Very cool Jack, up here in Minnesota we dont see much Mesquite. Beautiful graining and character. As a contractor Im always amazed when customers tell me that their trim and finish materials are too "busy". Let the natural beauty of the wood come through. If you dont, you might as well use plastic.


RC

[Titanium Dome]

If you don't mind my asking, how much time did you put in on them?