Assembling a Quarks flat-pack is fairly easy. But it is not just glue-up and done.

Assembly

The speakers are really tiny. Here is a picture of the unassembled flat pack as shipped by DIY Soundgroup in front of the unfinished Voxel:

Dry-fitting the cabinet shows that the pieces fit together well. Glue-bottle for scale:

I have never assembled anything that small. This lead to some interesting clamp configurations:

As usual, applying the clamps squeezed out some excess glue, but that is quickly taken care of by wiping it off with a damp rag. (No need to wipe off any glue from the inside. Squeeze-out is fairly small and on the inside it doesn’t matter at all). — We’ll have to seal the speakers with glue later anyways…

At this point I just glued the cabinets together and left the baffle (the front with the speaker cutouts) off. The current plan is to finish the cabinet with light grey spray paint and the baffle in black. Also the speakers are tiny (the woofer, which is the bigger speaker, is just 3″ in diameter), so the baffle cutouts are tiny as well. Assembling all the internals through a 3″ hole sounds very painful. So baffle glue-up is going to happen as the (almost) very last step of the process, right before installing the woofer and the tweeter.

I assembled one cabinet after the other, but at the end you get this: Meet L and R (baffles not glued on):

Sanding

While the flat-packs go together snugly, they are not perfect. If you look closely in the picture above, you might notice that the top panel is a tiny bit thicker than the rabbets that were cut for it. It is probably a millimeter at most, but it didn’t pass my litmus test for fitting, which is: You should not be able to feel a bump when running a fingernail over it. So I had to sand the top panel down to make it flush with the side panels. Same for the back panel.

The imperfections in the flat packs are really small, but to give you a better idea, here is a picture of L sanded and R still unsanded:

I used my trusty sanding block and 150 grit sand paper. Usually before I finish a piece I sand to 220 grit, but there’s more sanding in my future on these anyways…