Building w/my son...

[h2oTom]

Hello! I'm hoping to gain some knowledge that will aid me in building a set of speakers with my 11yr old son.

We've got a set of brand new Radio Shack 10" poly woofers (40-1014a) and a set of Dayton Audio tweeters (DC28F-8). I'd like to build a set of simple 2 ways to introduce him to some woodworking and some basic soldering.

My goal here is to build a decent sounding speaker that will have a friendly footprint. I've been playing with WinISD to design the enclosure and I when I plug in the numbers for the woofer, WinISD suggests a 6.25 cu ft sealed enclosure to get a .70 QTC. This would be a monster enclosure and not fit in the room.

I'm hoping to end up with something more along 2 or 3 cu ft. I'm not set on any particular cabinet design, just would like to the overall construction to be somewhat simple so that the build goes quick and keeps him interested. Any help / direction / advice will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance!

Tom

[Inductor]

Originally Posted by h2oTom

Hello! I'm hoping to gain some knowledge that will aid me in building a set of speakers with my 11yr old son.

We've got a set of brand new Radio Shack 10" poly woofers (40-1014a) and a set of Dayton Audio tweeters (DC28F-8). I'd like to build a set of simple 2 ways to introduce him to some woodworking and some basic soldering.

My goal here is to build a decent sounding speaker that will have a friendly footprint. I've been playing with WinISD to design the enclosure and I when I plug in the numbers for the woofer, WinISD suggests a 6.25 cu ft sealed enclosure to get a .70 QTC. This would be a monster enclosure and not fit in the room.

I'm hoping to end up with something more along 2 or 3 cu ft. I'm not set on any particular cabinet design, just would like to the overall construction to be somewhat simple so that the build goes quick and keeps him interested. Any help / direction / advice will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance!

Tom

2 to 3 cu ft. would be more than enough.

[Arty]

The tweeter You have found is okay, but the radioschack 10" woofer is not quite a goodone. If i was You i would get rid of those.
Peerless SDS 6-25/08 would be a nice -at least i think- midbass for the tweeters.
Probably will do just fine with 1,48 cu ft ported box, tuned to 40 hz or so.
Crossover feqvency wise somewhere between 2 and 3 Khz would do.

I did examinate the driver parameters of the 10" radioschack unit, it will not give a decent bass in any type of box, i would say a 4th order bandpass car sub would be its best usage. Not realy i could say its good for 2 way setup indoors.

[PeteMcK]

a sealed box, as big as you can make it is best for those RS drivers; 75L is OK, will get you to ~ -3db @ ~ 40Hz

[richie00boy]

Originally Posted by Arty

The tweeter You have found is okay, but the radioschack 10" woofer is not quite a goodone. If i was You i would get rid of those.

I agree. Try to find an 8 inch driver, it will also probably give you better midrange too.

[picowallspeaker]

The father projects and makes the cabinets
The son is employed in making the mold for two big waveguides
Together they'll mess their hands with glue ,plaster and paper rags
Buy two more RS woofers ,and use them as WG !!!

[tnargs]

Eight or nine years ago I embarked on a similar father-daughter project with my two daughters when they were about 11 like your son. We made 3 pairs of speakers, one pair each, and went through the steps together, each building our own pair simultaneously. I sourced discounted Vifa drivers, 1" tweeters and 4" midbass, and came up with a 55Hz cabinet using a slight degree of EBS, sized about 150mm wide 300mm high 200mm deep. Component costs were kept at the low end because there were six of everything to buy and I made it clear that mistakes were OK and all part of the fun even if some wood is wasted or drivers get a screwdriver through them (never happened).

I designed a simple 2nd order crossover which we each hard wired and hand soldered, including hand winding the air cored inductors by stretching the wire out along the hallway passage, cutting off the right length and rolling it up onto the former!

I left a pair of wires from the crossover hanging out the back of the cabinets, so twisting them together shorts out a tweeter attenuator and brightens up the sound a little. Cheap but tunable!

There was nothing that I did for them, they got to use the power saw and router, glue and screw and clamp and solder and wire and stuff and paint.

The end result speakers work fine, they don't measure that well compared to something more refined and expensive, but they sound quite good with sufficient bass, treble and overall tonal balance. They sound better against a wall or in a bookshelf, just how the girls use them in their bedrooms.

I can't recommend it enough to you Tom, we all remember the project fondly (although they sometimes didn't have much energy for it as we got near the end!) and we all still use our speakers.

[Godzilla]

I love building with my sons! We've built back horns where i've had them set up the inside pieces... BIBs where they helped glue and screw the tall cabinets together... and recently an open baffle where i showed them how to wire up the speakers and experiment with different capacitor values. It was very cool to be able to turn the speaker around and see it from the back. I think you should take what you already have and build sealed boxes that suit the room... stuff them with AcoustaStuff (non toxic) and experiment with capacitors to see how the sound changes. Keep it simple and have fun. The next project you build could be more challenging. In the meantime, you both get to spend time building something interesting and enjoy listening to music together.
Zilla