dougsmith
Posts: 2
Joined: 2009-05-18
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I am debating some alternatives for veneering a pair of speaker cabinets I am building, and would appreciate any advice the experienced folk here may be able to offer. The enclosures are from kits with CNC-precut MDF pieces (designed to be painted). These include ~1” radius roundovers on the front baffle edges and also on the joints between the side, top and bottom panels. The front baffle will be covered with grill cloth, so my quandary just concerns a veneering method for the side panels.
Option 1: Trim the rounded corners off the side, top and bottom MDF panels. Veneer the panels individually and reassemble them with rounded hardwood corner pieces that match the veneer (preferably with the grain going the same direction as the veneer, parallel to the long, upright dimension of the sides – this means rounding the end grain of the corner pieces).
Potential advantages and issues: Veneering the panels will be straightforward (could use a vacuum press); glue-up of the corners using biscuit joinery should be straightforward but the woodwork will have to be precise to get clean joints; getting a good match between the hardwood and veneer may be difficult; the roundovers will be challenging to cut – I may have to get them fabricated for me by someone with a milling machine; cutting the roundovers across the grain of the hardwood pieces may be a bad idea – expansion/contraction after assembly may cause cracking or separation (running the grain parallel to the length of the corner pieces would be better, but getting a nice match and smooth transition with the veneer will be more difficult).
Option2: Assemble the box with existing MDF pieces. Veneer the side, top and bottom panels with one wrap-around piece of veneer (grain parallel to long dimension), pre-bent at the corners using the hot pipe method.
Potential advantages and issues: No issues with gluing corner pieces and making large roundovers in hardwood; bending the veneer to a 1” radius across the grain may be difficult (or impossible; however, I have seen pictures of guitar makers doing this with rosewood pieces that are much thicker than the veneer I will be using); on the other hand, pre-bending the veneer may be a bad idea – I could opt instead for softening each consecutive corner and bending in place using a hot iron (gluing and bending each panel as I go around) if I was sure it would work; getting a tight bond around the corners may be difficult; If used the hot pipe method, I assume I couldn’t use paper- or PVA backed veneers (on the other hand, maybe some of those are flexible enough that I wouldn’t have to use the hot pipe method); I suppose another alternative might be to prebend the veneer with the hot pipe method in sections and then create faux miter joints between the individual panels at the midpoint of the bends with adjacent panels from different parts of the sheet so the grain does not match exactly (but then again, this might lead to separation problems eventually).
Anybody ever tried anything like this? Any recommendations?
-Doug
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