Preface: I mentioned this somewhere/somewhen recently, so I am going for it. If anyone's interested. If not, I'll stop quickly (I promise).
Many, many years ago, in the days of Jamie Melhuish's Full Range Driver site and forum, I was fairly smitten with "fullrange" (ahem -- let's be honest here; extended range) drivers. I curated (as they say) many, many (many) different ones -- new and old; large and small, cheap andexpensive well... somewhat less cheap. Full disclosure: I still have a lot of them. 🤦♂️ I also played with different "alignments" and enclosures.
Among the best of the lot was/is a pair of ML TQWT (mass loaded tapered quarter-wave tube) enclosures. These were designed by Bob Brines (any of y'all remember him and his site?) just for the venerable Radio Shack 40-1354 5-1/4" twincone driver.
The 40-1354 had some cachet because, back in the last century 🙀 Doc Bottlehead (whose company, back then, was still called Electronic Tonalities) and, if memory serves, Paul Joppa had used it in the "Hawaii Five-O" loudspeakers featured in one of their early newsletters. The 1354, said the good doctor (or maybe it was Paul) at the time, gets the midrange right.
No picture, but the 40-1354 was apparently "new for '83"
source: 1983 Radio Shack Catalog
source: 1984 Radio Shack Catalog
Y'all've seen my woodworking prowess. I contracted my friend, second-career carpenter/woodworker Mike Berg, to build me a pair of them.
My wood finishing prowess is only slighly more prowed than my ability to butcher wood, so I never finished them ("finished" in the sense of stain, oil, varnish, or urethane, that is).
(2008 photo, apparently, from House 3.2 in MA)
I also, ultimately, went a little crazy with chassis damping of the drivers (I think this was Dave Dlugos' fault, so to speak) and I eventually added a pair of Dave's phase plugs to a rather scroungy pair of drivers I'd picked up used somewhere along the line.
Pro tip: Mortite is (probably) fine for damping speaker baskets. It is not a great material to use for speaker gaskets -- at least on bare wood baffles.
Two-ish decades later, the oil in the rope caulk had diffused onto the baffles' surfaces. Whoops.
Also, one of the two used drivers had some issues with its surround: A scrape and suspiciously round hole that looked for all the world as if a screw had missed its target ("Did I do that?").
Meanwhile, our son had introduced me to a marvy product from The Real Milk Paint Company called "Half and Half": Half tung oil, and half a proprietary, food-safe "citrus solvent". I've already posted a bit on using this stuff on the Silbatone Bae cabinets currently housing a pair of Pioneer "biflex" drivers.
) based on the JE sketch/plan posted earlier in this thread. In fact, I just got some "Half and Half" from The Real Milk Paint Co*. to finish the cabinets.
Thanks to the comment (quoted below) posted to this thread earlier by @je2a3, I now understand why I could only front-mount the PIM-8L/SK-98 (one of each, actually, currently) in the baffles. Situational awareness isn't one...
As 2025 dawned, I finally got up the gumption to drag the speakers out of their resting place upstairs and perform a quick rehab focused on the above-mentioned opportunities.
Many, many years ago, in the days of Jamie Melhuish's Full Range Driver site and forum, I was fairly smitten with "fullrange" (ahem -- let's be honest here; extended range) drivers. I curated (as they say) many, many (many) different ones -- new and old; large and small, cheap and
Among the best of the lot was/is a pair of ML TQWT (mass loaded tapered quarter-wave tube) enclosures. These were designed by Bob Brines (any of y'all remember him and his site?) just for the venerable Radio Shack 40-1354 5-1/4" twincone driver.
The 40-1354 had some cachet because, back in the last century 🙀 Doc Bottlehead (whose company, back then, was still called Electronic Tonalities) and, if memory serves, Paul Joppa had used it in the "Hawaii Five-O" loudspeakers featured in one of their early newsletters. The 1354, said the good doctor (or maybe it was Paul) at the time, gets the midrange right.
No picture, but the 40-1354 was apparently "new for '83"
source: 1983 Radio Shack Catalog
source: 1984 Radio Shack Catalog
Y'all've seen my woodworking prowess. I contracted my friend, second-career carpenter/woodworker Mike Berg, to build me a pair of them.
My wood finishing prowess is only slighly more prowed than my ability to butcher wood, so I never finished them ("finished" in the sense of stain, oil, varnish, or urethane, that is).
(2008 photo, apparently, from House 3.2 in MA)
I also, ultimately, went a little crazy with chassis damping of the drivers (I think this was Dave Dlugos' fault, so to speak) and I eventually added a pair of Dave's phase plugs to a rather scroungy pair of drivers I'd picked up used somewhere along the line.
Pro tip: Mortite is (probably) fine for damping speaker baskets. It is not a great material to use for speaker gaskets -- at least on bare wood baffles.
Two-ish decades later, the oil in the rope caulk had diffused onto the baffles' surfaces. Whoops.
Also, one of the two used drivers had some issues with its surround: A scrape and suspiciously round hole that looked for all the world as if a screw had missed its target ("Did I do that?").
Meanwhile, our son had introduced me to a marvy product from The Real Milk Paint Company called "Half and Half": Half tung oil, and half a proprietary, food-safe "citrus solvent". I've already posted a bit on using this stuff on the Silbatone Bae cabinets currently housing a pair of Pioneer "biflex" drivers.
The cabinets were built by my son (who, unlike me, doesn't torture wood when he works with it
) based on the JE sketch/plan posted earlier in this thread. In fact, I just got some "Half and Half" from The Real Milk Paint Co*. to finish the cabinets.Thanks to the comment (quoted below) posted to this thread earlier by @je2a3, I now understand why I could only front-mount the PIM-8L/SK-98 (one of each, actually, currently) in the baffles. Situational awareness isn't one...
As 2025 dawned, I finally got up the gumption to drag the speakers out of their resting place upstairs and perform a quick rehab focused on the above-mentioned opportunities.
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