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DIY Waveguide loudspeaker kit

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My problem is that I live in the Midwest with 3 foot lot lines, modern uber crap construction techniques, slab foundations, and I rent for now. I have really obnoxious neighbors living in the house next door. They actually complained to our land lord because of my vacuuming. They claimed I woke them up with it. I mean, I think they are being a bit overly sensitive.

Someday I will find a better solution, and I'm pretty sure it will include a dedicated theater room in a finished basement.
 
assembley question

I have the boxes for the abbeys all glued and sanded and shellac'd and sanded. I was going to mount the braces, (which I had forgot about) but the side to side braces are both too short, -one more than the other. about an 1/16" and 1/8".

Any ideas about how to finagle this? I though about glueing shims on both sides, oriented vertically (where thinnest point is on the top) and slide the brace down from above until they are snug and glue them in...

-Tony
 
What often happens is a slight bow in the sides. If you have a clamp, glue the brace in and then clamp the side together. This will tighten up the fit. and expanding glue like polyurethane glue will be an advantage here. You could easily screw through the sides to draw them nto the braces, but then you have to fill the screw hole, buts that what I would do. Or a power nailer, like I have would work.
 
TRADERXFAN said:
Finally getting close to finished with these!

Question: What is recommended way to remove the mesh from the tweeter?

-Tony

Sharp knife through the foam and screen to the steel below. About 1/4" outside of the hole will work fine. There will be a small gap after assmebly from this, but thats what the clay is for ;) You will note that there will be a gap from the drivers construction, you just couldn't see it with the screen on. This gets filled too. You can assemble the driver to the plate and fill that seem first and then mount the plate and do a final touch up. If you find yourself using more than a few grams - at most - of clay then something is wrong.
 
Don't know if it is the "recommended" way, but I was successful using a small hobby knife.

I cut a few degrees around the mesh, then flipped the mesh up a little at the cut, grabbed it with a hemostat, and cut the remainder. Hemostat kept it from falling in and allowed me to tug on the mesh so I exposed a little more material when cutting (and kept my fingers away).

423120111_inPaR-L.jpg


Excuse the background, I was sighting in a rifle that morning.
 
Personally, I had to sand down the waveguide a little (max a few millimeters). The “throat” of the waveguide was too small for the plate… sanding it down to the right diameter was not an easy job, especially when the box is mounted and when the painting is done!
Reading Markus threat I thought that this “bug” was fixed, but not in my case… I just hope it is now for the coming customers.

Like Amiklos I put clay at both places, but very little between the plate and waveguide.

Regards,
Etienne
 
While I don't recall which anymore, one of those two mating points had such a small gap that I was unable to get any clay to stick without it bulging out. Once smoothed, it just sort of fell out. It's possible some stayed. I believe the only area I got any clay to stick, if I recall correctly, was between the adapter plate and waveguide.
 
Just fill in what and where you can. The goal is to have as smooth a transition as possible without having any sort of protruding surfaces. Since there will be a little bit of variation in the process, the actual areas and amounts needed from speaker to speaker may be slightly different. Your finger will do a good job at telling you where you need to add or remove a little.
 
The clay is probably most important at the junction between the driver and the mounting plate. This is because the driver itself has a gap there and it is much larger than any gap that you should see from the mounting itself. This is why I don't get too concerned with the mounting accuracy because there is ALWAYS going to be a big gap where the driver meets the mounting plate - far bigger than any that you will ever find from mounting tollerances. This gap will always need to be corrected.

As to the fit of the plate to the waveguide, this has been, is now and always will be the weak link in the process. That's because all of the tollerences add up there. I always check this spot and correct any problems before assembly, but I had neglected to put this in the manual - it's there now. Before assembly any corrections are easy, it's only after assembly that they get tough. That said many things have changed in this regard. First, I don't use plexiglas any more, it was not stable enough in fabrication to hold concentricity, etc. and it was also brittle and weak and would tend to crack in use. I now use polycarbonate, which is exceptional, albeit about 3 times as expensive. I also have remade and refined the tooling for fitting the plate to the waveguide. All of this has improved the consistancy of this mount a great deal. But perfection can still only be obtained with clay and careful fitting before assembly.

Finally, it appears as if the next generation of Nathans will have the cabinets assembled before shipping. The idea of selling a kit required an expensive process to fabricate the parts. It turns out to be about the same price to just get the cabinets assembled. It may be that all of the kits cabinets will come assmebled in the future. This just seems to make more sense. The only potential problem that I see is shipping to EU. Its not likely that the kits done this way will be cost effective to ship. I'll have to check on options in that regard as they come up.

All in all the entire process and the product has continually been improved with only minor cost increases. I expect this will continue.

As posted elsewhere, I now have an elliptical waveguide in the works, but don't wait on this as a product. First, it will be many months before I have an actual part to test, then there is no reason to believe that this will be a sufficient improvement in performance to justify what would have to be a substantial increase in price. It highly likely that the performance will be quite comparable to the Abbey, while the added complexity will raise the price significantly. This seems like a bad idea to me. But only time and data will determine that outcome.
 
pjpoes said:
While I don't recall which anymore, one of those two mating points had such a small gap that I was unable to get any clay to stick without it bulging out. Once smoothed, it just sort of fell out. It's possible some stayed. I believe the only area I got any clay to stick, if I recall correctly, was between the adapter plate and waveguide.

Matt

I have never had this problem, but I suspect that your clay is not very sticky. Most clay sticks like crazy. But then you also seemed to have trouble with paint sticking. Maybe you needed to clean the waveguides of mold release better.
 
pjpoes said:
I'm confused, does the clay go where the driver meets the clear lexan adapter, or where the clear lexan adapter meets the waveguide? Or both? I only placed it where the clear lexan adapter meets the wave guide. Also, I took my driver apart and removed it that way.

Both places.


amiklos said:
I put it in both places. My only reasoning was that when I ran my fingers across that area I could feel small gaps at both the driver-plate and plate-waveguide interfaces. Didn't take much at all to smooth out those areas.


That is exactly the correct method. It takes very little clay.
 
gedlee said:

Finally, it appears as if the next generation of Nathans will have the cabinets assembled before shipping. The idea of selling a kit required an expensive process to fabricate the parts. It turns out to be about the same price to just get the cabinets assembled. It may be that all of the kits cabinets will come assmebled in the future.

Could you please clarify? What degree of completion does "assembled" mean here? (- it has to mean something different than "assembled" does on your website!)

Just glued/screwed together, still needing to be filled or ready to paint?
Braces installed?
Would the drivers ship separately or be installed?

And finally, is this how the Harpers are now? Any pics of the Harper yet?

Thanks
Tony
 
Its not fully defined at this point - still being negotiated. My intent is to provide the cabinets "ready to paint". The drivers will still come from B&C and the crossovers parts from Madisound, but the enclousre won't be in parts. Its just easier to get the enclosure right when its done that way.

The Harper will ship that way now. I'll have pictures in a week or two, just now getting ready to paint.
 
Paint question and a little insight for others on building this kit

Well I have a bit of a problem...

I was always intending to get paint the abbeys in a nice high gloss, if not piano black gloss.

but as it has taken so very long to get them even this far, I started to think I should do it quick and dirty with the bedliner finish. I have done this before and it was pretty easy and fast.
After filling/sanding, filling/sanding I just used multiple coats of bedliner spraty.

This time however, I was following someones advice to put a base coat of flat paint down on the speaker so that you only need very little of the bedliner spray to finish the texture. So I got some flat black latex based paint and brushed it on. However, I FORGOT to wipe down the waveguides with acetone first... so I think this is what caused the paint on the waveguide to separate.

After one coat I decided 2 things. I need to get the latex off of the waveguide, and I shouldn't have wimped out with the bedliner. These are supposed to be world class speakers, I should make the time to make them look that way...
:whazzat:
Although I guess since there is a strong possiblity that we are going to build a home theater and these will end up being behind the screen anyway. -But who knows how far down the road that will be.

So I used a very narrow wood shim to gently scrape off the waveguide. I had tried sanding but this worked way better. Then I took the power sander to the rest of the box. Now its sanded back down to the MDF almost entirely but there is a grainy black residual amount of paint in small spots.

So my question is. Can I paint over this? What should I do from this point?

Matt did you repaint yours? I think you mentioned you were going to after you realized you had used latex by mistake. But perhaps you are happy with the way it turned out?

I think I should re-shellac again to make sure its well sealed.
I have bought the Bin primer. I had intended to use this in the first place. But then I was concerned about this being compatible with the auto paint, if they were to do it.
If I do it myself, I planned to use black lacquer. However there is so many sanding and rubbing steps with this stuff.
-but maybe I underestimate the amount of steps the auto body place has to do?

Please help.
Thanks in advance for advice...


-Tony
 
Tony

And anyone else. Never ever use Latex paint, except on walls, and even then, I don't use it on walls. Latex is not a durable paint and it is not compatible with almost any other paint. It is for walls and only walls.

I would make sure and get every drop of latex off because any good paint over the latex will be a problem. Use a paint striper as this will easily remove the latex. No solvent based paint can be painted over latex, not shelac, or Bins, basically nothing.

I have painted almost 100 cabinets now and I still have trouble getting them right. I know many poeple like kits, they feel better about doing it themselves and they think that they are saving money, but in the end I don't think that it is a very good idea.

I sympathize with you as you have a big problem and a big job correcting it on your hands now.
 
Geez that was a scary post!

Faced with such a grim and daunting task... I looked to the internet.

"Whatever horrible paint or wallcovering may have been used before, you can make a new start with B-I-N. One coat will transform the grimmest, darkest colors into a flat white ready for new finish paint or wallcovering. "

- the BINS AD!

BINS was designed to go over paint, even latex. So I feel pretty good about my chances now with BINS primer (after sanding off the latex) and then do the spray can black lacquer.

:cheers:

Tony
 
TRADERXFAN said:
Geez that was a scary post!

Faced with such a grim and daunting task... I looked to the internet.

"Whatever horrible paint or wallcovering may have been used before, you can make a new start with B-I-N. One coat will transform the grimmest, darkest colors into a flat white ready for new finish paint or wallcovering. "

- the BINS AD!

BINS was designed to go over paint, even latex. So I feel pretty good about my chances now with BINS primer (after sanding off the latex) and then do the spray can black lacquer.

:cheers:

Tony

That may be true, but latex as a foundation would make me very nervous as it has terrible adhesion properties.
 
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