5 Tips - Building Speaker Boxes

My personal advice for building speaker boxes. Make sure to share your own tips.

Music Credits:
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

[Marveltitanslilhulk]

This guy really knows his stuff about building enclosures ! I am in the process of finishing up an install using an enclosure design created by him, and although i still have some fine tuning to do to the amps...everyone that has heard it thus far are trully impressed and cant believe 4 10" subs are producing that much sound !

[kingok]

Thank"s .Wonderful tips.Thinking of building floorstanding speaker.

[jbarelds]

Great video. I always have my panels sawn to length by the DIY store. But I too had issues with panels not ending up precisely the right size, so last couple times I account for that in that I have some specific panels made 2mm bigger on purpose so that I can make everything fit nicely using a router and flush trim bit. What I also do is draw out the panel cuts for the DIY store guy, so that the saw doesn't have to be reconfigured to saw different panels with matching lengths / widths.

[miks]

These are great tips, I recently built my first bass box using just hand tools, and it turned out well, but I had to do a lot of hand sanding to finish it. I also used simple binding posts to save time and money.

[TopHatCat]

I used wooden pegs first before I glued my speaker box panels together. I sanded down where needed and it went fairly well.

[WishfulWanderers]

Good and reasonable tips. Thanks for the Advice

[getahanddown]

The last comment was great :)
I remember my first boxes going together with 'no more nails' thick goo not PVA lol

[saurabh]

I use a circular saw to tear down a plywood sheet with Kreg Rip cut guide. No matter how much you try, there is a chance that there are some boards which are not perfectly square and some edges which are not perfect 90 degrees. I end up using a Flush trim bit with a perfect square board as a template. Since I am tight on storage space and have no place for a table saw, I end up spending time on making the edges square, with a flush trim bit, which also makes the edges as close to 90 degrees as possible. I bought a lot of clamps (still not enough :) ), and I do end up gluing the whole box together at once (without the baffle though). I built the speakers called "Continuum II" this way and a sub woofer called "Baby boomers" following Jeff Bagby's designs.
This is obviously more time consuming, but quite accurate. I also make sure to get router bits as well as good saw blades. This way my plywood sheets don't tear. And the results are quite close to accurate with smaller tools.
Thanks for talking about the 90 degree angle problem :) That is a great advice. I did mess up my first box since I was assembling panels 2 at a time, and had to redo all of it.

[RONNYGUITAR]

Screws can (and IMHO should) be removed after the glue is completely cured. Then drill out the holes to allow for dowels, or fill them up. Just make sure there will be no air pockets!

[capableman]

I disagree on the use of screws, however this was a great informative video! 👍

[aareBellah]

Any recommendation on wood type and thickness?

[danielesbordone]

I'm kind of tired of building my own speakers because I'm not very good with the finishing, but at the same time the speakers you buy are pretty lousy. The drivers are cheap, the crossovers are terrible and even the box is usually lightweight unless you dish out big big money.

[HPMIKE]

Great job on the boxes but I just wanted to know if I have a ported box specially made for port can I still plugged it and it’s not what happens if I plug port?

[tkrios]

Great tips! Another tip is when you have to cut two identical panels (I.e. front and back panels) tape them together with double-sided tape and cut them together.

[LoffysDomain]

Now I just need a workshop and tools ;-) Nah, it's Ok. Thanks for a great video.

[zorhis]

How do u usually clamp port spots if it's near the middle of the box with clamps

[moneypizzle]

Any idea why we don't see any Midfield DIY active crossover 3-way designs. Like at all?

[Soundbrigade]

I use T-nuts or those things you screw into the wood with threads for the drivers. That way I can remove and install them without worrying that wooden screws will eventually come loose.

[pauliusvaskys]

Like your videos. Also bought some courses from Udemy and those were very useful. Thanks Marius for your advices. :)

[JoshM]

Very good tips.

Though if anyone tries to get their stuff cut at Home Depot or Lowe's I'd recommend simplifying the cuts as much as possible and bringing a tape measurer. And avoided getting any cuts done by people who are in any way rude or grumpy. They don't care about you and your cuts and will screw It up. (Or maybe bring a snickers for them if they are)

My cuts were so far off I couldn't fix them after the fact because they were both 1/4" or 1/2" too short and too long. I could fix them if they were too long. But too short made it worthless to me.

I ended up finding a seller of higher quality Baltic Birch Plywood thanks to that though. So that was a good thing. The plywood seller also cut the plywood for a small fee with accuracy so good I'd say it was within 1/8th of an inch to my dimensions I provided. I did provide a cut sheet which helped simplify the job for them. But they had a very fancy saw thing that made it easy to do that.

With all that said if anyone even reads this far into this. I have also had a great experience with Lowe's. The person there that day was wasn't rude or grumpy at all and felt like they were at least happy to be there and help. So the cuts they helped with were pretty much within 1/4" which is more than acceptable considering I just needed a couple of panels trimmed down to fit in my suv to be further cut on a friends table saw.