attn: shinobiwan & tony gee & others with thick front baffle cuts

[sqlkev]

Hello gents,
Let me get straight to the point. I want to make cuts on the front baffle s to look like this

what was your method of cutting? and what tools did you use?

I'm looking at this pic from tony gee's website

and wonder if that's the way he cut all his baffles.

I was thinking of a sliding miter saw, but not too sure how accurate the cuts would be. Plus, I'm not sure how to hold the thick baffles in place for the miter saw to go through.

any help is appreciated guys.

[Geenius]

That's the way to cut the baffles! It can also be done with a hand-held circular saw set to 45-degrees and then cut from both sides if you have experience with such machines. Always done it when the cabinets are completed. After sawing, sand to smooth things nicely.

[AR2]

Another way of doing it is with belt sander. MDF is really good for sanding - you could make almost any shape just by sanding. I did my baffles that way. At the time I didn't have hand held belt sander but the bigger stationary one. That was hard because I had to hold my triple MDF baffles while sanding them in the angle that I wanted to achieve. I think that hand held belt sander would be much easier to work with.

[richie00boy]

Wow, is that veneered?

[AR2]

Yes it is. Mapa Burl.

[richie00boy]

Did you do it yourself? How did you get the corners covered like that?

[AR2]

Yes I did it. You could find more in this tread:
Finally, my new LAMBDA-PHL-Esg3 speakers are done. Check them out.

Good question. Corners were hard to do because they were rounded. It would be much easier if they have been straight. Veneer bends nicely on the grain side, but breaks across. So I was trying to follow grain on the corners. After that it needed just a light sanding - almost not touching it in order to smooth the edges. I would strongly recommend to use paper backed veneer as it is much easier to work with particularly for bending.

[AR2]

Ribbon enclosure was done from one piece. I glued sides first where I left extra veneer overlaping coners. Once I glued sides than I carefully removed extra veneer by cutting it with sharp kniffe. After that I lowered top portion of the angled piece and again cut extra veneer withot overlaping each other.

[richie00boy]

Thanks. I'm currently struggling to try and get a sub project veneered.

[ShinOBIWAN]

I was inspired by much of Tony's work when I set out doing the big baffles. Thanks Tony!

I used a sliding double bevel mitre saw for all my cuts, the limitation by doing it this way is that your baffles can only be around 30cm/1ft in any direction to get a clean cut, this is primarily because the mitre saw only slides so far. However with a bit of careful setting up you can turn your work around and nearly double the length of the cut to around 50cm. You've also got to limit the thickness of the work to around 10cm.

Despite these limitations it does provide a very clean, quick and accurate cut.

If you take a look at these photo's its easier to how they were done:







In this shot you can see the mitre saw I used and also a couple of the off cuts from the baffle.



EDIT: Just one tip; if your doing this method where you laminate a few bits of MDF together than I highly recommend veneering. If you plan on spraying be absolutely sure to use wood hardener and a rather daft amount of primer coats to ensure that the joints do not creep back through the paint and become visable. You really can't have too many coats here and I can't exagerate that enough. I estimate I've done at least 10-15 primer coats and then sanding the whole thing flat before applying the finishing coats. Its quite rediculous really but the effort is worth it.