Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere

I wasn't expecting the new box style for the M3's I thought that these boxes were reserved for the AxiomAir.

Heck, the M3s came in fabric bags too. Nice touch.

They are currently white (primer) with black grills. I am hoping to get some time to test them, tear them down, and then put some paint on them tonight yet.

I thought it was four Airs!

So, I got 4 "paintable" on-wall M3s to use as ceiling speakers for Atmos and DTS:X. I wasn't sure what to expect as there is very little documented here about these, so I figured that I would add some photos.

First off, they are in primer white.




Without grill:


The back states not to remove the brackets when painting, but it will be tricky to get a nice finish with these still on there. I will probably take them off.


Here is everything disassembled:


Close up of the empty cabinets:


And a close up of the tweeters, woofers, and ports:


I will say this about the finish. It is fairly smooth, but definitely had a slight texture to them. I took a 320 grit sanding sponge over them VERY lightly (pretty much a light back-forth-back-forth and that was it and they are SMOOOOOOOTH...

Still debating if I want to use a foam roller for these, or spray them with my HVLP sprayer. The sprayer works really nicely, but I've only used it once so I am no expert at using it.

Spray...
Practice on something else lol

Yeah, I am thinking the same thing. Really, it isn't hard to do the spraying, I have a tricky time getting the paint thinned just right for the sprayer, but I've got plenty of cardboard to practice on.

I need to make some sort of "hanging hook" system in the garage so that I can spray all sides of each cabinet and leave them hanging to dry and respray. I'm thinking that I will hang them from the garage door "tracks" and then unplug the garage door opener to prevent accidental opening.

I can't help but wonder about the new packaging....were they shipped in a clamshell design foam?

HVLP is rather simple if you get the consistency of the paint right and spray at the right speed and distance.. OK.. it takes some practice.

1. the HVLP came with what looks like a small cup with a hole in the bottom. (Hope you didn't throw it out.) Use that with a stop watch to get the right consistency for your paint. It is really the only way to get it right.

2. if when spraying you can see your finish pooling and blowing around the surface, then you are way too close.

3. if you are getting a speckle or orange peel like coverage on the surface, then you are spraying too fast and too far away.

take some more photo's of the process. this is very interesting,

Nick , I took off those brackets on my QS 8's the thing I missed was the little nuts on the inside and I broke one of the screws off. Mine were double nutted and the wires from the crosser were connected.

The box was a couple different pieces.

You can see from the pictures that they are a box middle, and two larger "end cap" box pieces. Both "end caps" come off, and then you have the inside foam padded box ends that fit inside the outside "middle" section to hold the speaker from moving around. You remove that and there is the speaker, inside a cloth bag.

The inside, foam padded ends seem a little "universal" in that they were square, and not specific to the M3s. My QS8s that I bought even a few years back had angled foam inside the inside pieces to match and snuggly fit with the angles of the QS8 itself.

Yeah, the last time I used it was a couple of years ago when I was painting a large piece of furniture and it turned out fine, but I don't think that I was doing it quite right because it took a lot longer than it should with a sprayer (based off of videos I saw online). I will give it another shot today, if my wife stops giving me work to do. Ugh. I feel like taking a vacation day next week when she and the girls are back in school just to get going on this stuff. (They all are home for spring break this last week and yet somehow they don't have enough time to get their own stuff done and it prevents me from doing what I need to do...)