So I know I said I was going to focus on the electronics. And I've had a play with that - I'll write about it later. I've also got the body of the radio up and going, so that's my focus here. The body started as a big chunk of wood pulled from the scrap bin at a local timber recycler. It was in said bin because it had a bunch of nails in it; not many, but enough to make it uneconomical, so they would've cut it off the end of a longer, more salable beam. At a guess, it's possibly a wharf post or something? Hard as the nails embedded in it....

I cut a thick slice off the beam end (with a band saw. Neither easy nor precise...) Managed to avoid nails in the cut path, but there's one still buried in the final piece. I then routed out a spot for the speaker to go.

Again, I can't claim this was precisely done... There's a few over-routed bits, plenty of extra chiseling required and not a pretty finish... I also went too far and had to add a few extra blocks to mount the speaker into. Would've been great to have a CNC mill to do a proper job of it, but then the work piece wasn't flat to start with...

Apologies for the horrible photography on that one - needed the flash to show up the details. You might also notice a bit of a crack along the bottom - whilst chiseling (with poor technique!) I broke the whole narrow jaw off the bottom right. It glued back ok, but not great. The whole thing looks better from the front

The little black circle on the right side is from the router chuck pressing in and burning the face of it (I did some routing from the front side). It's also visible around the bottom left corner. The wood's got plenty of cracks and other things, but I'm going to be charitable and call that "character"! With the speaker in, it should look a bit like this:

I plan to mount the electronics in the back, again by routing out a space (but not going through to the front). The front will still look like this when it's done, and the controls are currently planned to go on top, on the right, like so.

I'm planning to use a screen from an old Nokia E63 (I've got 2 of them lying around). I'm also sure there'll be a volume knob, which may double as a power switch. It'll probably be continuous rotation, since I'm planning to often control this remotely from a phone/other device. I'm unsure what other buttons will be there and what they'll look like.

Once the glue dries, I'll be mounting the speaker and giving it a test run. I'm still working on all aspects of the electronics (have started on some...) so you'll read about those in due course. I guess there may also be some tweaking of the sound once the speaker's mounted and I know how it sounds. Hopefully the next update comes a bit sooner!