Figure 20. The completed unit.

Woo-hoo! I was delighted, as because this was the first time I had envisioned something in the planning phase and gotten better than ninety percent of it to materialize. The sidepanels were built from oak with cherry veneer caps on the front. The top panel was a section of plywood (recommended as thin materials are otherwise prone to warping over time) overlain with cherry veneer. All is glued together from the inside, stained with a mahogany oil tint, and finished with four coats of polyurethane interspersed by fine-grit sponge sanding. The vent screen is aluminum, painted gloss black.

Figure 21. Another view of the completed unit.

As planned from the beginning, there are two screws on each side of the wood cover to secure the cover to the chassis base. Finally, a rear view:

Figure 22. A view of the rear panel.

This is a bit rougher than I would like, but fortunately, it is also not visible most of the time. The loop feed was intended to be an interposing point between preamp and amplifier for the shaping equalizer. In practice, design issues in my grounding layout resulted in nasty hum loop when this was attempted, so the shaping equalizer sits in front of the amplifier, and its output feeds the main input jacks.

The aluminum L-bracket covers up a rough joint between the wood cover and rear panel, and also improves the overall stability. As with the front panel, the brushed look was achieved via sanding, and an acrylic spray coat was applied to protect it from oxidation.