large-radius edge pieces for baffles?

[Bill F.]

I'm looking for some type of ready-made piece of wood or mdf with something like a 90-deg. curve with a radius of about 4" or so. I'd like to use them as edge pieces on speaker baffles. Any ideas? Hacks, maybe?

Bill

[pinkmouse]

Your best bet would be to see if you can find an architectural millwork shop near you. To get that kind of size you need a big spindle moulder, or lots of work with hand tools.

[dwk123]

Rockler has 3" radius 90-degree corners , and 1.5" 180-degree half-rounds of MDF. I got some of the 3" corners and they look pretty good , although they're still sitting in the garage so I haven't tried building anything with them.

aitwood.com has cylinders and cylindrical plywood components, but I don't know any more than that.

[Paul W]

Hi Bill,
The 3" x 31" quarter-round Rocklers are good quality...great service. One of four had to be replaced for shipping damage, but no questions asked and they reshipped immediately.

AIT has MDF quarters up to 6" radius by 96" long...also good quality and fast service but packing was terrible. Four out of four 6x96 pieces arrived damaged...then they decided the problem was mine to settle with UPS.

Tape-Ease has very large plywood quarter and half rounds...haven't tried them yet.
Regards,
Paul

[mwmkravchenko]

Bill I have been plagerising your good designs since you first published in Speaker Builder. Time to give something back.

I have always used bendable plywood instead of the stuff you used. I did your first tower exactly as you are describing. Narrow baffle with 4" radius edges. The baffle was just wide enough to house twin 5" woofers with a KSN 1177 in the middle. Looked like a million bucks all oak veneered and so on. I radiused the top edge to. I should get a picture of the beast. It was built for a client.

Bendable plywood consists of three layers. A thin veneer and on both sides of the veneer are two thicker veneers that are laid so that their grains are oriented in a parallel manner. The thin central core is laid perpendicular to the two outer faces. The stuff is available in 5/16 nominal and 7/16 nominal. Just guess which thickness I'd reccomend for you radius! A curve that small will have to be done in short sections but some under lying ribs and a good air nailer and some glue will do the trick.


Checl this out. http://www.tapeease.com/plywood_panels.htm

It's about half way down.

Lazy way- http://www.bd-international.com/Curved.htm

Hope this helps. If your stuck just tell me what you want and I'd be happy to whip it up.

Mark

P.S. If you are in a bind you can make ordinary plywood bendable. The trick is to saw through all but the last veneer layer in even intervals. How many cuts depends on how tight you want to bend it. If you are worried about strength you can laminate two ( around the correct radius of course ) layers with the comb teeth set inside against each other and the uncut veneer edges on the outside faces. But it is a lot of work!

[Bill F.]

Thanks everyone.

BTW, I've never been published in Speaker Builder, so I'm guessing I'm not the Bill F. you're thinking of, Mark--but many thanks anyway.

Cheers all,

Bill

[JSprague]

I got two 96" long 3" radius pieces from Aitwood last year. They were high quality and arrived fine. There was enough wood past the radius to make most of the front panel of my (narrow) speakers. There is just enough wood in one of the pieces to make one pair of radiused Phoenix clone front panels.

[herm]

One more supplier that I have used:

http://www.bd-international.com/Curved.htm

-herm