After looking at numerous horn designs and deciding they were beyond me right now I am pretty set on building a set of Metronomes! I've settled on the Fostex FE167e as the driver due to price/performance considerations (buying a house this year, money is limited). Since these are my first speakers my experience is negligible. The only DIY I've really done is Headphone amps! 
With all of the articles mentioning the Metronomes I'm assuming there are quite a few of these things around. Unfortunately I'm a software engineer, not a wood worker! The plans have been giving me some headaches... My attempts to make a model in SketchUp from the plans at Frugel-Horn have been mostly successful yet frustrating. I just can't envision the actual build process in the Birch Plywood to make this thing happen!
One of the main things that I'm stuck on is how to do the angles on the boards. I saw in the thread "My Metronome Experience" that he did some of his cuts on a table saw at 86.5 degrees. By my model in SketchUp the actual angle for sides of each main piece are actually a bit more than 86.5 degrees, but not quite 86.6. Will 86.5 degrees work just fine? Then there's the lean angle of each board that appears to be ~86.1 degrees. If I do the 86.5 degree cut on each of the 4 side boards I'm assuming that I can just lean them against each other and just make sure that the edges match up?
Next are the "feet". Trying to make them flat at the angle the boards will be leaning at is confusing me! Then there's the arches. It appears that each arch is going to the height of the bottom of the mass loading board with the port. Is this height supposed to be done when the board is at 90 degrees then lean it over? I'm also assuming that the top cap and the port board should just have their edges angled to about 86.5 degrees? I'm uncertain as to how to physically do that. There's also the fact that the height of the actual boards isn't very clear. The plans show the speakers having a total height of 64 3/8" but doesn't list the actual board length!
If anyone is interested in my current SketchUp model I'm happy to email it to anyone who asks. I just don't have a good file store area on the Net at the moment. I really want this project to go well so I'm very caught up in all of the minute details... I hate not being exact at this sort of stuff so any help in creating these seemingly awesome speakers will be greatly appreciated!
My main issue is obviously that I have extremely limited wood working experience! Fortunately I have a few friends who have made some small furniture that will be helping me with the actual cutting and assembling. The father of one of these friends was generous enough to offer his personal workshop for my use on this project. He's a manager at Lowe's and has a 2 story separate building for his work shop!
I haven't actually been in it yet, but supposedly he has quite a nice selection of tools to use.
With all of the articles mentioning the Metronomes I'm assuming there are quite a few of these things around. Unfortunately I'm a software engineer, not a wood worker! The plans have been giving me some headaches... My attempts to make a model in SketchUp from the plans at Frugel-Horn have been mostly successful yet frustrating. I just can't envision the actual build process in the Birch Plywood to make this thing happen!
One of the main things that I'm stuck on is how to do the angles on the boards. I saw in the thread "My Metronome Experience" that he did some of his cuts on a table saw at 86.5 degrees. By my model in SketchUp the actual angle for sides of each main piece are actually a bit more than 86.5 degrees, but not quite 86.6. Will 86.5 degrees work just fine? Then there's the lean angle of each board that appears to be ~86.1 degrees. If I do the 86.5 degree cut on each of the 4 side boards I'm assuming that I can just lean them against each other and just make sure that the edges match up?
Next are the "feet". Trying to make them flat at the angle the boards will be leaning at is confusing me! Then there's the arches. It appears that each arch is going to the height of the bottom of the mass loading board with the port. Is this height supposed to be done when the board is at 90 degrees then lean it over? I'm also assuming that the top cap and the port board should just have their edges angled to about 86.5 degrees? I'm uncertain as to how to physically do that. There's also the fact that the height of the actual boards isn't very clear. The plans show the speakers having a total height of 64 3/8" but doesn't list the actual board length!
If anyone is interested in my current SketchUp model I'm happy to email it to anyone who asks. I just don't have a good file store area on the Net at the moment. I really want this project to go well so I'm very caught up in all of the minute details... I hate not being exact at this sort of stuff so any help in creating these seemingly awesome speakers will be greatly appreciated!
My main issue is obviously that I have extremely limited wood working experience! Fortunately I have a few friends who have made some small furniture that will be helping me with the actual cutting and assembling. The father of one of these friends was generous enough to offer his personal workshop for my use on this project. He's a manager at Lowe's and has a 2 story separate building for his work shop!
