I mentioned in the last post that I’m building a custom electric guitar cabinet.  I’m using select pine for the box and birch plywood for the speaker baffle.  Here are the construction pics so far…

Cutting the birch.  I clamped a 1/4″ thick metal strip to the board as a guide.  Seriously, it’s the only way to make really straight cuts with a circular saw.  Also, investing in a good blade is important, especially for plywood.  Get a carbide-tipped Bosch or something that’s got at least 40 teeth.

Cutting the baffle

The first speaker cutout.  Tone Tubby (speaker maker) packed the speaker with cardboard, and one piece had a circle perfectly sized to the speaker for me to trace.  WAY easier than using a homemade compass or something.  Thanks, Tone Tubby.  I used a jig saw with a fine blade to make the cuts.

The first speaker cutout

Here are the pieces of pine and birch after cutting.

Baffle, sides, and top

Nope, it’s not done.  I just stacked the pieces together to see where I needed to sand them to fit.  By the way, I once heard someone say that when you’re woodworking, you should remove the word ‘perfect’ from your vocabulary.  Really good woodworkers just hide things better than normal people.

The pieces stacked together

Coming next: Lots and lots of sanding, gluing the internal bracing strips that will attach the whole thing, and testing the speaker baffle.