For the 1% hard-core nerds: the writeup includes lots of details and rationales for my design and build approach.
For the vast majority: Just peruse the pics of the build process! The stands look simple (okay, they ARE simple), but it's pretty cool how many different techniques were involved.
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After changing components in my upstairs and downstairs speaker systems, I had ended up with my living room’s ELAC B6.2 speakers using empty S19j Pro boxes as stands. I don’t have a spouse, y’all; I’ve been fine with this shit setup for months!
But motivation and some inspiration finally struck so I brainstormed some plans in SketchUp (which is an AMAZING tool!).
Kinda hilarious, but SketchUp always starts new projects with a person included for scale
I kept in mind some basic audiophile design principles:
Speaker height
You want the speaker’s tweeter (the smallest speaker in the cabinet) right at the listener’s ear height.
Spiked feet
My living room has thick carpet. Spikes are meant to stab all the way through the carpet to the floorboards, giving the stands much better stability. They’ll be a lot less likely to tip over when bumped.
But more importantly for audiophile nerds: conventional wisdom is that you want a stable platform for your speakers. Speakers have to physically push air around; you don’t want to introduce any additional variances or vibrations from a mushy/wobbly platform.
Fill ‘er up with sand!
For the same reasons as above, you want a dense, heavy stand that is as inert as possible. Filling empty space in a stand with sand obviously adds weight but also reduces any chance of additional ringing or resonance from the structure itself.
Components
Each stand consists of:
- Speaker shelf: plywood board cut to the exact footprint of the speaker.
- Column top/bottom boards: Same as the speaker shelf, but with 45° bevel cuts on 3 edges.
- Bottom base board: Same as the speaker shelf, but 2” wider in 3 directions w/bevels.
- 1” PVC pipes and flanges
- M8 threaded t-nuts and spiked feet
The boards are 3⁄4” baltic birch plywood. Cut to size on the table saw. The angled bevels in the design are simple 45° cuts that I can do safely on the table saw. I like the clean simplicity of the look (I’ve always loved the design of ziggurats!) and for DIY simple is always better.
Having 3 of the 4 boards start from the same cut size simplifies the table saw setups. And then the bevels are all the same 45° angle so that’s a single setup.
Building
Added 3⁄8” holes via the drill press so I could hammer in threaded t-nuts for these gorgeous spiked feet.
Plywood looks like ass on its own. Painting it helps, but the exposed edge striations still show through. So this was the first time I tried sealing it with wood filler. It’s a paste that you can thin with water. Instead of using a spreader tool, I found it easier to just use my fingers. Wetter, thinner coats worked better.
That raw mess then had to be sanded down with 220 grit sandpaper. The plywood should now have its porous, thirsty edges filled and smoothed over.
Then I got to break out the amazingly awesome bug excretion: shellac!
Dissolve the flakes in denatured alcohol and then apply as a sealer.
The hope was that this would provide an even smoother base surface for the spray paint, seal off the thirsty flat faces of the plywood, and provide an ideal contact surface for the paint to adhere to.
After a few coats of shellac, I sanded everything down with 400 grit sandpaper.
Then I planned out how I wanted to arrange the PVC flanges.
And transferred that to a paper template.
Used one of my spring-loaded punches to mark pilot holes through the template on each board.
Pre-drilled the holes to depth and then used 1-1⁄2” construction screws (HUGE fan of torx-style star screws instead of phillips head).
I re-measured my target height for the speaker stands, cut the 1” PVC to length (felt safer using my table saw crosscut sled than the mitre saw, but either would be fine), and glued them into place. Annoyingly / weirdly, the flanges exerted a little bit of ejection pressure on the pipes that I wasn’t expecting. So I had to quickly grab a scrap board and push down on all three columns at once and try to keep them down, fully seated in the flange, and as level as I could guesstimate.
I let the glue cure for 30 minutes, then filled with sand.
I prepped the columns’ top board for gluing the mating PVC flanges. But I was worried about how I’d ensure that the tops would end up level; it would look so sad and janky if those platforms made my speakers sit askew.
So I ended up using a bubble level app on my phone. Zeroed it when lying on the base, then put the phone on the board I was gluing on as I held it down (remember, the PVC flanges want to slightly eject the pipes until the glue starts locking in). Then I could slightly adjust my pressure to keep the bubble level at zero-ish.
I also looked down the back edge of the stand to keep the platform aligned with the base to try to avoid any possible slight twisting in the horizontal plane (around the z-axis).
Yes, I know, my garage is a mess.
PVC glue ups are unavoidably messy. I had some paper towels covering the base to avoid any glue drips that might mar the plywood that I worked so hard to smooth to perfection!
30 more minutes to let the tops cure. Then on to spray painting!
I used Krylon Fusion in black satin. It’s designed to adhere to just about any surface type. Important since I’ve got plywood and PVC here. Satin to give it some sheen to hopefully make the materials look more premium than they are (especially the crappy looking PVC).
It was windy so I did it inside the garage but with the door rolled up for ventilation.
Final touch was to cut a bit of nonslip silicone to go on top of the stand. Not so much to prevent the speaker from slipping, but more to absorb any surface imperfections that might interfere with how the speaker sits.
And it’s done! (er, not quite)
Some misgivings (as always) discussed below, but overall really happy with the results!
I intentionally left the top caps of the foot spikes in their original silver for a nice contrast. I f’n LOVE how the whole look for the base came together!
But my design does have a final piece that’s still missing: a narrow board of dyed wood (walnut? Figured maple?) to run vertically along the back of the stands to act as a color accent (I’m thinking a fairly strong dark red tint) and to channel and hide the speaker wire.
I haven’t tried to dye wood in such an aggressive way so that’ll be its own rabbit hole. I’ll dig into that later. Or never. 🤷♂️
Lessons learned
Sand is heavy, but volume matters
1” PVC doesn’t hold much sand! I thought each stand would take on ~20lbs of sand. But with 1” exterior diameter PVC columns that were only 19.5” tall… just not much volume to work with there. I didn’t weight them, but the stands are probably ~15lbs each IN TOTAL. Better with the sand than without, but certainly not the density I was envisioning.
I suck at spray painting
You really have to focus on consistent passes that may go on thin and just leave it for a second or third pass later. As soon as you start trying to get full coverage in a specific area, you create buildup that is visibly uneven when dried. Or worse, you create runs or drips. I spent all this time perfectly smoothing and sanding the plywood, only to create much bigger, more obvious flaws with my shitty spray painting technique.
Shoulda stuck with iron
My original plan was to use black iron pipe for the columns. But pipe sections that have threading at each end only come in specific lengths. At the time that was just too limiting when I was trying to hit an exact height for these stands. Plus some of the iron parts were just annoyingly more expensive than I expected (not necessarily out of my budget, but annoying).
So I switched to the PVC approach and figured that once it’s all spray painted, there wouldn’t be much of a visual difference anyway.
The pipe flanges would have looked better and, more importantly, the iron would have added considerably more weight. The build process would have been easier and cleaner without dealing with the PVC gluing mess, flange ejection, and the worries about getting it all level during the ~60s that the glue sets.
You do NOT always (ever?) save money via DIY
I probably spent more on parts for this than I would have spent on off-the-shelf stands. Some of it is amortized over materials I’ll be able to use on later projects (e.g. the tub of wood filler, 1-1⁄2” construction screws) or might find a use for (e.g. plenty of leftover t-nuts, 50+ lbs of sand!).
But the PVC glue kit will likely dry out before I do my next PVC project since they tend to be infrequent.
Overall the goal probably can’t be about saving money. It’s more about getting a final result that’s tailored exactly to your own specs and getting to enjoy the fun and challenge and satisfaction of building, learning, and making mistakes along the way.
Satin is still a little too glossy
I wanted a light gloss to give the build some pop / wow, but the glossier something gets, the more the imperfections stand out.
Can see a spray paint build up blob, drips, imperfections in the plywood, even f’n bits of sand that I failed to brush off before painting! 😡
The PVC flanges do still sorta look like PVC but also mostly came out better than I expected.
Misc notes:
The t-nuts ended up being a bit of over-engineering; since I thought the stands would be heavier than they turned out to be, I wanted a stronger mount point down there (more threads, broader surface under the board to distribute the weight to avoid them tearing through).
But the spikes do thread in really nicely and make the the bases seem way more pro-quality, so no regrets here.
