The Pluralist Pods Get Roofs

Autodesk Fusion renderings effectively communicate design assemblies and subassembly relationships.

If you can reasonably visualize something you want to make, you create dimensioned drawings and build it. If you don't understand, you prototype and iterate until you do. After deciding to emphasize object design and make something out of the ordinary, I extensively used renderings to prototype my vintage audio high-frequency driver pods before I began building them.

I found something unforseen while doing so. Renderings allowed me to understand construction processes without prototyping them in the workshop, saving time and the scarce lumber I had allocated to the project.

I also found that rendered subassemblies like the one included here on the right help me better understand their relationship to the main assembly, where I can divide a somewhat complex project into a series of subassembly builds.

The completed high-frequency driver pods with their angled roofs are shown in the photos here. I built the pods from scrap wood I had lying around. Red oak, jatoba, and mahogany were included.

The roof planks are trapezoidal in cross-section and alternate up-down with even spacing between them. I used black oxide screws to fasten everything together for an industrial look. Fusion provides added benefits, such as access to the McMaster-Carr catalog and its essential hardware components.

If you're interested in the finer points of speaker design, the center spacing between drivers should be no greater than the wavelength of the crossover frequency.

The Pluralists Get Pods

So they say blog posts are a thing of the past. My last post here was eight years ago. I used Instagram posts when I wanted to tell the story of some recently completed project work. It didn't take long to discover that Instagram was not the place to tell stories. I suddenly realized that this almost forgotten blog was. So let me say welcome back.

Nowadays, there is quite an interest in vintage audio. I became interested in it last spring when I bought a decades-old Harman Kardon receiver that closely resembled one I used to own. I designed and built a pair of small full-range speakers long ago and hooked them up to the Harman Kardon. Paired with the receiver, they absolutely sounded vintage.

 

Full-range speakers are known to have a problem. They extend mid-range frequencies. So, to correct the problem with mine, I made the speakers into bass units, added high-frequency drivers, and used off-the-shelf 2-way second-order crossover networks.

 

The high-frequency drivers needed small cabinets, which I designed and called pods. Their design was initially uncomplicated - too much so - so I reasoned that the pods created a design opportunity.