Enclosure Build: kerfed ports, dual 12's

[treossi]

yeah those older saturns ran forever, their still really good cars though.. i've seen some 90s models with over 500.000 miles on them.. im a technician at a saturn dealership in socal btw

[amazinblazin10]

that's some mighty fancy kerf work ya go goin on thur.. yeehaa

[BEllithorpe04]

very nice

[siucsaluki11]

this has motivated me to try and kerf my next box. Im thinkin of building a new box for my clarions. Only thing, idk how big of a radius the kerf needs. port is going to be 14.5 x 6 and i made it with a 5" outer radius, think thatll be fine? Kerfs are new to me.

[Pioneer~Saturn]

Thanks guys. And yea, you can have whatever radius you want really.

A quick bit I wrote up for another member on perfect kerfing..usually a simple .5" spacing will do the job just fine..

But if youre looking for picture-perfect kerf bends where the kerfs mate perfectly on the inside of the box after you bend it...some math is involved.

You'd first:

-Draw up your enclosure on google sketch-up

-Highlight the outside of the kerfed area of the board, right click and go to 'entity info', there it will tell you the length of that area of the board along with a couple other pieces of info.

-Write down the length of the outside of the kerfed area (having notepad open to write notes is handy here). Also, mark the length of the straight areas of the board on each side of the kerfed area, these points will be where you stop/start the kerf cuts.

-Now do the same for the inside of the kerfed area and write down the length of the area

-Take the outside length of the kerf and subtract the inside length, this is the amount of material you need to cut away in order to make the bend perfectly mate when bent

-Now, if you have a table saw with a standard .126" wide blade on it, you'll want to devide that # by .126 to see how many cuts it will take to take away that amount of material (it will most-likely not be a round number, in which case just round up one cut)

-After you know how many cuts it'll take...go back to the length of the outside of the kerfed area and devide by the amount of cuts you need to get the spacing between each cut...youre now finished with the math part of this.

-Once youre ready with the panel cut down to size, lower your blade a bit with a piece of 3/4" mdf next to it so you can eye-ball the height so it'll leave around 1/16" of material left.

-Get the lengths of the straight portions of the panel you marked down earlier and transfer the lengths to the panel youre cutting, they will be where you start/stop the kerf cuts.

-Run a random scrap-piece through the table saw and see how much material is left to check if you need to adjust the height of the blade.

-Now set the fence for the first kerf cut, making sure to account for which side of the blade you want on the mark.

-Now adjust the fence 'X' amount to get the spacing you need that you found earlier.

-Continue with these spacing until you reach the other mark/the number of cuts youre aiming for

Once you finished, you should be able to bend the board and the inside of the kerf cuts mate pretty much perfectly on the inside. If you rounded up on the number of cuts due to the math not being seamless, you will most likely have a small space in one of the cuts that you can fill with resin...I would 'paint' the kerf area with resin after it's mounted btw.

[siucsaluki11]

any magic depth to make those cuts? I used ur little tutorial earlier, to do it the harder way isnt much harder, just takes a few extra min, but to me it seems worth it.

[iTech]

Soo Clean!

[Pioneer~Saturn]

Thanks.

And yea, I usually leave around 1/16" or so