Key chains? T-Shirts? Pfft. Nothing captures your fandom better than a $200 speaker grill. Think about it. (1 available)
Opeth Speaker Grill:
Material: 12 X 12 X .25 6061 aluminum plate
Time: ±60 hours total (design, cursing, programming, machining, finishing)
This project was certainly an exercise in endurance. It all started with a phone call. I got a call from a good friend of mine asking about the possibility of doing a 10 inch speaker grill cover with the Opeth "O" inside it. Simple enough, sure, I thought so too. To be fair, this could have been far simpler than it ended up being. I rarely see the line until it has been crossed. The end result was worth the trouble, to be sure, but if I had to do it all over again...how about I just not do it over again?.
I searched the web for a vector image of the Opeth logo and found a beautiful eps version somewhere. Unfortunately beautiful on paper doesn't always translate into beautiful CAD drawings. The screen shot doesn't do any justice whatsoever to the horror of tiny broken angular lines that spewed out of the conversion at me.
This is what we're looking for. Smooth, sweeping curves that will be soul-crushingly tedious to machine. That's what we like. Which for me means I need to hand trace the image to get what I want. This is the kind of fun that makes carpal-tunnel surgeons very wealthy indeed.
A couple of things happened here. First I needed to simplify the design a little bit. If you compare this image to the actual logo, you'll notice the smaller swirls and the wheat-looking projections were smoothed out to get out of at least some of the tedium. I also truncated the tail that snakes out so that I could center the "O" better in the circle and fill the frame more. Then I scaled the whole thing to fit in the diameter we needed for the speaker grill.
Then come the holes. Glorious holes. More than 6000 of the little bastards. I made the sections in different colors so that I could program them in groups. I was sure I was going to lose a tool or twelve in the process of making four grills, so I prepared to be able to restart the drilling in whichever section the tool broke in. This way I wouldn't have to start all the way over. A good thing, considering there was almost four hours of drilling.
Time to machine. This is the fixture (with a few battle scars from other people's projects). I started out holding this baby in two vises, but it was too thin to not deflect too badly. So it ended up being bolted directly to the table.
The easy part done. I fastened the part to the fixture through the mounting holes.
I didn't take any photos in process for this part, because I didn't hang around to watch it. Total machine time came out to almost seven hours. That and every tool (except one) was small enough to max out the spindle. So that's almost seven hours of high-speed whine. No thank you sir, none for me.
A close up to show some of the elevation. Total thickness was .250, the artwork was machined to .125. I didn't bother facing the raw stock, as I was going to sand it after the next step.
The painting. I went for the traditional black. Now all it lacks is a heavy hit from the orbital sander, and I can put the sixty hours of work in these things behind me.
Done.
