- Welcome!

- The Walkthrough
1. Step ONE
2. Time to Buy!
3. Cutting MDF
4. Sand
5. Routing Circles
6. Rabbet
7. Round the Edges
8. Fun with the Vent
9. The Crossovers
10. Cabinet Assembly
11. Almost there!
12. Veneer and Finishing
13. Connect the Drivers
14. In Conclusion...

- Materials

- Schematics

- Cited / Useful Sites

- Q&A's

- Email me (Alan)

- The Oracle at PE!
The Walkthrough - Introduction


Above: Here we are engineering our own circle jig out of old scrap. (One way to save $20)
I'll begin by admitting that not only was this my first attempt at building a pair of speakers, but this was also my first try at anything furniture-related... not to mention that this is the largest wood working project I've ever taken on -- big time. I had never used a router, a radial arm saw, or even touched raw veneer. Building the Dayton III has turned out to be both exceedingly rewarding and, at times, equally frustrating. My main frustration came from having to make INNUMERABLE journies to nearly 12 places of business in my searches for many of the parts I needed. This was compounded by the fact that I couldn't find a comprehensive tutorial anywhere detailing the construction of a very high quality / low budget pair of loudspeakers from scratch. (Luckily, I was eventually able to locate Wayne's masterful designs.) Of course, even more frustrating was the geographic seperation between myself and my friend who owned all of the tools we needed. Accordingly, our project took over two months to complete -- not counting the research I conducted before even deciding on the Dayton III.

Update: Later, I found THIS book (Designing, Building, and Testing your own Speaker System: with Projects by David Weems)

This Web site is intended to be a pseudo-cookbook to assist you in your own speaker building efforts. Even if your project is not specifically the Dayton III, most of the techniques roughly outlined here apply to nearly any speaker project.

Below I've listed the power tools that we used. All of the actual materials (ingredients) that went into construction can be found by clicking HERE. You may decide on other ways to go about things, but this is what WE used:


Above: Here you can see all of the pieces involved before they were adulterated by the router.

  1. A Hand Router (With this we created the flush mounting recessions for the drivers, flared the ports, cut all the circles, and rounded the front edges of the side pieces.)
  2. A Radial Arm Saw (Used to make long accurate cuts through the MDF - theoretically)
  3. A Nice Drill Press (We used this to drill holes for the pivot point and pilot hole for each cirlce that we routed. This wonderful device is able to create perfectly straight holes, so we used it as much as possible.)
  4. A Hand Drill (Using the hand drill we created pilot holes for the screws - in cases where it wasn't possible to use the press.)
  5. A Handheld Belt Sander (... We had some problems with the radial arm saw. Thus, we had to sand much more than we should have... this tool made that job a bit more efficient.)
  6. A Dremmel (The inside of the speaker holes were quite easily sanded to perfection with one of these.)
  7. A Hot Glue Gun (The Glue Gun was used to attach the crossover components to their platforms.)
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