Stage Two

During the next two months we saved like crazy to embark on the plan in the cooking pot. Both armed with part time jobs and little social lives any money we had went into the pot.
By august we had just over £1000 to begin the journey. The next step was to look at the products available to us. This began with the speaker drivers we wished to purchase.

On the various sites that we had researched the named product that had been highly recommended was Precision Device or PDs known to speaker builders. This also created another problem.

To get the types of equipment we were interested in as well as the correct types of connectors with fast and secure delivery for expensive and fragile pieces we needed to use a well established company. This took some time. We spent a few weeks going to various club nights and outings looking a other speaker systems and asking other companies and people who they chose to buy their products from. The answer appeared to us to be a company known as Blue Aran. So we began with our first order.

The first products were PD186 700W 18"driver 8ohm of which we purchased two. These would be the bass section of the speaker system. We then also purchased a PD153ER 400W 15" driver 8 ohm which would begin our kick bin or mid section depending on the quality. We also bought the correct connectors for the speakers being Neutrik speakon connectors.

While in wait for the items we had bought in our first order we began the first build, being the bass bin. We chose to base the design on the speakerplans.com 1850 folded horn the difference in our design is that the front panel of the horn fold is the section where we load in the driver and the baffle being directly behind the fold. This makes our horn length slightly shorter but the horn width wider. This change for us made the design slightly easier and cheaper to construct.

We chose to build the speaker box from marine plywood which we chose to buy from B and Q the reason for doing this as there are companies and builders merchants that would be able to supply us with cheaper products is that B and Q have the ability to cut the wood in the store to our description. This would make our lives slightly easier in terms of firstly fitting a very large and heavy piece of wood in the car to get home. But also using the industrial cutting machine on site in the store meant that the edges were smoother than they would be using home tools.

The next section to complete is the construction of the bass bin which we began with constructing the box to then place the horn sections in and baffle. We used small nails and screws to fix the box together . Once these were in place we could then fill in the gaps with industrial wood glue.

These sections must be left to dry before we can continue with the inner sections of the cabinet.

This time span with ordering, measurements and building took roughly two weeks with a time span of roughly two hours per evening.