Near the end of 2020 I decided to get a new car. My old car had an upgraded stereo and I didn't want to get rid of the speakers or audio equipment. As a small project I decided to build a speaker box to make use of the equipment. I was only going to be home for about a week and a half so I stripped the old speakers, designed and built the enclosure, and carpeted the box in about 5 days.
There were a few requirements for the box that came from the intended use. The speaker box was going to primarily be used in a garage gym at school but would also be moved sometimes. Because of this the box needed to be portable and easy to carry. The other main requirement was accessibility to the electronics. If I wanted to add a sub-woofer or amplifier I wanted to be able to add these features down the line.
Removing speakers from car
After defining the design goal and requirements I started modeling the box in Solidworks. The overall box design had a center compartment for the electronics and enclosed compartments for speakers. As previously mentioned one requirement was portability, using this requirement I capped width of the box at 30" so that most people could carry it alone. Because of the wood I had available the overall width ended up being 26". After designing the box I made cut plans for the wood pieces and drawings for the speaker cutouts on the front face.
Speaker box in Solidworks
After cutting the pieces and assembling the box the next step was creating the connections for the speakers. I used this project as an opportunity to practice my soldering skills so the connectors I chose used bare wire on one side and are soldered on the back. The rest of the connections to the speakers and radio used spades. The wiring was relatively simple and was done in such a way that it can be improved later. I was planning on using a terminal block for the speaker leads from the radio but it did not arrive in time.
Although the box turned out better than expected there are a few improvements I want to add. The first improvement is the aforementioned wiring improvements. The current wiring works but could be much cleaner. Another improvement would be to add an external I/O switch to the front of the enclosure. Again this was planned but the switch did not arrive in time. The last major improvement would be the connections for an external amplifier and sub-woofer. This would add a fuller range to the box and increase the use cases. Overall the box turned out pretty well and was a good project to practice the full engineering design cycle over a break. I even got to practice some new skills such as soldering.
