I decided to experiment with stainless steel enclosures... This was pretty hard to achieve, but it turned out very well. Because of bipolar bass/middle placement, they "disappear" and those ribbon tweeters are wonderful in this configuration. Crossovers are second order Butterworth @5KHz, internal damping is dense foam. Front and rear sides are some sort of dense board used for wall insulation and is glued to the steel with construction contact cement glue. Very thick and dense wood based stuff that's nice to work with and it has fake wood grain. Finding the right drivers for these enclosures was really hard, if you look closely, there's no space between the walls and the driver's basket edge. The enclosures are 5mm stainless steel thats used in food industry and are finished in automotive valve cover wrinkle paint. Size of the speakers is 100 X 150 X 150mm, internal volume is about 1.5 liter, and each speaker weights 3.8kg! 😂 The sound is open, clear and punchy, they go down to about 200Hz. I love them! 💪
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Interesting. I have occasional access to large cutoffs of structural steel tubing but have never considered such for speaker enclosures.
It's really hard to do this, the steel square tubing is never perfectly square, so you have to file each speaker's front and back side to fit snuggly into each opening. That's why you can see the numbers on mine, each is slightly different. But I managed. I also had standoff plates welded inside. Alot more work than just building the boxes from mdf.
Never thought of doing that. If I used stainless steel, I would think about polishing them to a mirror finish.
Stainless is a big thing with artists that do sculptures for City art pieces.
Having done fabrication for a few sculpture bases and sheets for parts of the art pieces.
My god what a royal pain that stuff is.
Grinds hot, cuts hot , eats tools
Doesn't weld like butter aluminum which evaporates instantly if you don't have experience.
But stainless welds weird. Wide range of wires and needs special gas ahhhhhhhh.
Admire anybody's patience that works with it, cause you need a lot of it.
When those projects left the shop, bye bye. dont miss you
Nice project though, good tight spacing with the tweet.
Having done fabrication for a few sculpture bases and sheets for parts of the art pieces.
My god what a royal pain that stuff is.
Grinds hot, cuts hot , eats tools
Doesn't weld like butter aluminum which evaporates instantly if you don't have experience.
But stainless welds weird. Wide range of wires and needs special gas ahhhhhhhh.
Admire anybody's patience that works with it, cause you need a lot of it.
When those projects left the shop, bye bye. dont miss you
Nice project though, good tight spacing with the tweet.
It was a royal pain in the a$$ to do anything with it! I dulled so many drill bits... Grinding out the holes on those welded plates that hold the fronts, took me more than 2 hours. And I did it with a huge Makita dremel. Interestingly, this stuff files easily, I think it requires low speeds and low heat when working with it.