Above: If my friend hadn't been paying attention at this point I would have cut this piece nearly one quarter of an inch too short! |
Use the schematics I put together as your guide for all of the cuts. Following them exactly should produce a replica of the D3. I will discuss all of the routing (circle cuts, rounded edges, and flared ports) in steps Five through Eight.A word of warning - MDF is a mess! Accordingly, wear glasses of some sort and a mask. Also, since power tools can have a bark that's nearly as bad as their bite I strongly advise, nay - demand, the use of ear protection. Additionally, unless you want to clean every surface of every exposed item in your work area, I suggest you do the cutting outside.
Here is one alternative that you may wish to consider for your Dayton III cabinet construction experience. (aka. something I should have done, but wasn't thinking about at the time.) You may have noticed by now that the overall width of the enclosure is 9 1/2". In my schematics I instruct you to cut the front and rear baffles 8" wide -- which means that they must be inset between the left and right sides in order to maintain the 9.5" overall width. This just means that the seams will be visible from the front -- but I really didn't care because I veneered the whole thing anyway. If you'd like you can cut the front and rear at a full 9 1/2" and consequently shorten the left and right sides by an inch and a half. Of course, this means that you should round the edges of the front instead of the forward facing edges of the sides.
By the way, if anyone finds a serious error in anything I have posted here please let me know so I can fix it.
Also: Here's something else that we would do differently if we were to tackle another project like this. Instead of pulling the radial arm saw across the wood to make our cuts we would have turned the blade sideways and PUSHED the wood through it (like a table saw). We ran into a problem when the arm on the saw was only long enough to go halfway through our sheets of MDF... so we had to cut from each side and meet in the middle... Also, the saw's angle was off by a tiny fraction of a degree so its cuts weren't perfectly straight - we were able to compensate for that one, though.