Wolfhorn SDX Design Finished - Page 4

Cutlist is ready. This build requires just under three 4x8 sheets of 3/4" plywood. Much better than my last design, which got well into a 4th sheet. The jury's out on whether or not I'll be using Arauco instead of the usual 11 ply shop birch... it all depends on what the prices are like on wood buying day. If the prices haven't changed much, I'll probably be looking at about $120 for wood. From there, all I'd need is 2 big tubes of PL Premium, lots of screws, and some 1" dowels to brace the throat segment with. The rest of the horn will not be braced... the width is narrow enough and the 3/4" plywood is stiff enough that I may not need it.

There is one panel I have to install in sections again to prevent the need for a 4th sheet of ply. Going to do that the same way as I did with the last project, only this time the panel needing the extension will not be the one right in the throat. I may not be leaving the metal brackets I use to hold the extension in place while the PL dries inside the box this time.

Ordering the drivers in 3... 2... 1... now

Ah, so it is... thanks. Doesn't seem to make a lot of difference to the design though, to my profound relief. I can leave it be.

Are or aren't?

Spent all evening trying to come up with a multiple taper design I wanted to try folding. Didn't work out too well - too much obsessing over the reactance annulling. I can get it to look better than the latest single taper revision I posted, but trying to get the reactance spikes as far down as possible while getting the impedance spikes to line up and match them drove me nuts.

I better just leave version 3K alone, I think. I'm just not able to do any better at this point in time with these woofers. Beats my last horn by a mile - I suppose that's good enough.

Now that you mention it, it is shallow enough to peek through 16" O.C. wall studs. There's some flexibility with mouth placement as well - you could put it on the bottom panel instead of where I have it without issues as long as it's at the end of the horn and the same area.

Don't want to speculate too much on how much like a SPUD it might be. Don't have one to compare with. It's not quite as smooth a response as it could be if I had weeks to cook up a good multiple taper design. But the woofers are more capable than the 8's used in the SPUD so I'm using that extra displacement to drop the corner to 16Hz without losing SPL.

If this horn is anything like my last one, it won't stop at 16Hz either. I hope to get reference down to 14Hz in room with this thing. My TB horn already does 14... just not that loud.

Drivers have arrived. First impressions... I picked the right tools for the job. These things are seriously beefy... much more so than the Tang Band woofers I used last time. Diaphragms are nice and strong - the compression ratio of the horn should be no problem at all for them. At any rate, they're in one piece and the DMM says the coils are just fine. I'm good to go when the warm weather gets here. I'll break them in sometime between now and then when I get a chance.

Here's a picture of them on top of the Tang Band horn:



And one posed inside the TB horn to give some idea how the SDX compares to the W8Q-1071F:

I'd say it's more of a "first couple of warm days I get" project. Now that the woofers are here I just want to build it and hear how it does

Nothing yet. Still winter out there, though it's supposed to be above freezing for a few days. It's going to take a while yet to get rid of all this:



Will get the drivers broken in next week if I can remember to do it.

And now, I present a video of the driver break-in in a lame and futile attempt to make it look like there's actual progress being made:



Still a huge pile of snow out there, even though we've been above freezing for 3 days now. The warm spell is going to last a couple more days and then apparently Mother Nature thinks we need more snow and cold again

Nope - there was a ton of it to melt, and it's not leaving fast.

35.6 Fahrenheit.

Right up until I saw the price. Not worth the trouble.

Lucky you

It's on.



Once again, I went with C2 grade shop birch from Windsor. 11 ply, as good as it ever was. You couldn't beat the price with a bat even before they put it on sale for the month of May. $30 a sheet means all my wood cost me $95.

So far, I'm in this project about $320 for drivers, $95 for wood, $12 for screws, and $20 for two gigantic tubes of PL Premium. I get $447 when I do the math.

Of course, I did have to drop $60 into the gas tank to go get the wood from Medicine Hat...

Yes I am. Either that, or it's my evil twin. We share the same body and imaginary friends.