more than in any other industry that I have seen

I dunno, I work in auto and let me tell you some things. Granted, I’ve never worked in aviation.

Most of the kits on both sites are going to be pretty solid. You’ll be able to find reviews for most of them, as well as a bunch of forums like audio karma and what not.

As for cost/benefit of DIY speakers, DIY speakers that are well designed will punch well above their BOM cost (eg a $300 to build diy speaker will generally outperform a $300 retail speaker). But if you have a pair of decent hifi speakers already it might not be worth the dive. Most commercial speakers tune for a “house sound” so switching brands can be a bit off-putting at first. Let’s just say that burn in is a two way road and part of that road is your ear acclimating to the sound profit of the speaker.

Thanks for taking the time to type out that reply, it packed a ton of information. I think you’re under selling the eye and the technique necessary to sand well. I’ve done some DIY auto-body and paint work and I really struggled to know when I had sanded well enough. Yeah, I knew I needed to sand more, but I had no idea where to focus my efforts and couldn’t easily distinguish a high spot that needed to get knocked down vs low spot that needed to get filled. Building that skill to the point of it being intuitive seems like something that would take a decent amount of practice or a great coach.

I hadn’t considered polishing ASA. I’m somewhat tempted to give it a go. The hardest thing for me would be figuring out how to sand large curved surface in such a way that doesn’t result in lots of obvious flat spots. I can absolutely see sanding/polishing making prints a bit stronger.

I’m sorry to hear about your physical condition and wish you as much additional recovery as possible. I totally get having very limited time with two younger kids in my house. I think all in the build took 4-5 months starting from printing parts, ordering a kit, and finishing assembly. Even though my kids are not new to me anymore, I don’t know that I’ve fully come to grips with the fact that I can’t complete projects as quickly as I once could and I should probably slow down my rate of project accumulation.

No problem! If you’re already designing speakers, printing vs making them out of something else will come down to your CAD skills/speed vs how long it would take you to make a finished enclosure out of a different material like wood.

I wouldn’t call anything about the process hard, but it can be a bit time consuming if you’re not a CAD ninja already. Either way, doing this will probably improve your CAD skills.

If you’ve never designed a speaker before, you could purchase a kit for one of the many DIY speakers out there and print the enclosure. My first DIY bluetooth speaker was an Overnight Sensation MTM stuffed in a very undersized, and ported, wood enclosure with a built in bluetooth board, basic BMS, and amplifier. Parts-Express, Madisound, and a number of players make getting a complete DIY kit easy.

I’ll take a stab at the colors: slicers are very good at consistent extrusion widths. They do the best they can with varying width, but rarely nail it the first time. The only thing you can really do is fiddle with print settings or change the design to have consistent width extrusions, but that will obviously impact the design. Even with consistent width extrusions you might have to fiddle with extrusion width to nail it.

As for your first layer, are you seeing different squish in different areas of your bed? If yes, are you using a bed mesh?

Grab a few of Ellis’s first layer patches, spread them around your bed, and focus on getting them all to look the same.

Edit for link: https://ellis3dp.com/Print-Tuning-Guide/articles/first_layer_squish.html

Sorry for the delay. Yes, I did design it myself. I made a small post about it here that includes some frequency response curves. It sounds much better than the sun of its parts, which weren’t that intentionally chosen, but it also makes it obvious how much DSP modern wireless speakers have - especially in the bottom octive. I personally like making things vs buying, so this is right up my alley. I will (eventually) get around to making an updated design with better components, but it’s doing just fine so far.

The print itself have proven to be very resilient. It’s been knocked off a counter and fallen to the floor more than once. It also frequently serves as a step stool.

Printed enclosures have a bad rap for not being “dead”, but the rounded design without large flat surfaces is pretty dead. Yeah, the top and bottom aren’t flat but they’re not a uniform thickness to give them a bit more strength. The walls are “only” two perimeters, but the extrusion width was something like 0.8mm on a 0.6mm nozzle. I think the print has ~18% infill but it’s been a while now.

Let me know if you would like any more information!

Thanks!

Seeing some of these newer models that work right out the box make me excited! (Although building one yourself is always more fun if you’ve got the time)

You can have a bit of both! Build a Voron and wind up with a pretty darn reliable printer. I posted about mine here.

As promised earlier, here are some prints:

Printers are a lot easier and more repeatable than they were 12 years ago. In FDM the big advances are print speed, quality of life, and filament material. Home SLA printers are also a lot more available than they were 12 years ago, but the overall process here hasn’t changed (print, rinse, cure). The big question is if/when SLS will make it to a home user price point.

My prints are mostly self designed and functional. I’ll have to dig up some examples once I’m on a computer.

I’ve dabbled in both automotive work and home renovation. Anyone who can do auto body work or interior finishing work well deserves way more credit than they usually get, so big kudos. I am pretty solid at the mechanical bits, but when it comes to finishing/painting things are a lot more difficult for me.

Print finishing is something I’ve thought about a few times now, but most of my prints are functional and live a pretty hard life. A bit of texture from layer lines and other imperfections is the least of their concerns. That said, I have sanded ASA some and it sands amazingly well. I could see getting it pretty smooth without too much effort and then either using a solvent based or finishing based method. Of course, if your print has a lot of fine detail this is going to be a massive PITA.

You can totally build a Voron anyway! I suggest magnetic panels, which makes popping the top super easy if you want to print PLA. I’ve run PLA, PETG, TPU, and ASA through mine. I have an under bed carbon filter that does a pretty good job with fumes.

Agree on bike parts being a good print test bed. I’m impressed that anything held up with pedal loads, there’s a lot of force there.

My main motive for sticking with ASA is its easily attainable high volumetric flow. I can easily swing 30 mm^3/s on my Rapido without having to jack up temps. Between this, Core-XY motion, and input shaping prints are way faster than my old i3 clone. PETG is quite a bit slower. PLA can be fast, but it’s also somewhat brittle.

Makes a huge difference with my junky TPU if it is dry or not

I am happy to have gotten lucky with Overture 95A!

ASA/ABS

I design my own prints too, but I also have a 350mm x 350mm bed. My bed size has lead to some fairly large prints. My printer is a Voron and I originally built it with the stock acrylic enclosure. This was fine for smaller parts (say 150-175 mm and smaller), but despite keeping keeping corners rounded and avoiding rapid shape transitions I still had some prints pull themselves apart or pull the print bed up. Even on cylindrical and rounded rectangle prints, without a solid top or bottom. It wasn’t until I insulated my Voron that I was able to pull these larger prints off with a chamber temp of around 58 C.

Maybe I should try another material as so far I’ve been sticking with polymaker ASA because it’s cheap and prints decently. What are you using?

That enclosure might work for smaller ASA prints, but I needed a lot more insulation than a garbage bag to pull off larger prints.

Maybe I got lucky with TPU, but I didn’t run into any significant issues with humidity when I printed treads for wagon wheels over the course of two or three days.

TPU will be nearly impossible for your kiddo to destroy. ASA/ABS are rugged, but if your print has thin surfaces it’s less strong in my experience than PETG.

I didn’t find TPU hard to print personally, just go slow and turn retraction way down or completely off. It will string pretty good, but most slicers have a setting to avoid crossing perimeters that will keep it in check. The only thing I would be wary of is ending up with a floppy print, so make sure the part has some structure.