Grimster,

I know what you mean about hiding the natural look of wood. I haven't stained any of my projects for a long time, however in your case it seems more than appropriate. Furniture needs to fit the space and a natural finish on your cabinet might distract your attention from the screen. The screen is really the focal point in your room. In my case my HT is part of my family room and the cabinet needed to fit in with the other cabinets and furniture in my house.

I read in your Polk forum this is the latest of several cabinets you've built. Its recognition of your craftsmanship when folks make unsolicited offers to buy what comes out of your shop.

I'm curious how you intend to construct the shelves for your cabinet. Ply with solid oak edging? Any reinforcement to prevent sag? I'd be a little concerned about managing your 7700; its a beast at around 100 pounds!

Gonk, glad you enjoyed the pics!

Well, as far as my shelves go there are made out of oak playwood with the solid oak edging like you said. As far as sag goes I'm not really to concerned about it because the heaviest peice of gear that will go on the shelves is the 990. The 7700 will be on the bottom shelf this time instead of next to it like it was with the last cabinet I built. As far as the bottom shelf goes there will be 6 casters on the bottom (1 in ea. corner and 2 down the center) which will prevent it from sagging.

I like your solution with the casters. It will solve any plywood sag and allow you to move the cabinet later. I used furniture glides since I've got a tile floor but I might have simplified the design if I'd built in a center support under that bottom shelf. Mmmm, next time...

Another thing I did when designing the shelf is I made the unit 24" deep, but the adjustable shelves are only 20" deep which will allow me to have over 4" of space from the back of the gear to the front of the finished backing to run all my a/v cables and then run all my power cable on the outside of the finished backing to try and prevent any humming that could become present.

I like that trick, grimster - cable management is always a bear, but that's pretty slick. Are you leaving openings in the back to facilitate rear panel access?

The shorter shelves will certainly make it easier to connect your components. I knew my cabinet was going to be pretty open from the front (see my last pic above) so I routed all my cables along the back. Like Grimster I segregated power cords and signal cables to avoid any hum issues. I got frustrated with cable management and ended up making most of my own cables to reduce the amount of spaghetti behind my gear. I'll post a pic of the back of my cabinet later tonight.

Okay, updated the pics guys, click on the polk link on the third reply to see my status.

Cool! I didn't notice the cutouts in the middle supports before. I was wondering how you were going to get cables from one side to the other. It is a little hard to tell from the pics, but have you applied a finish over the ebony stain? What did you use for stain? And what have you, or will you, use for a final finish? Nice hanging shelves!

I used Olympic Oil Based Ebony Stain. As far as the finish, it's hard to tell from the pics but the stand has two coats of Minwax Fast-Drying Polyurethane thats been sprayed on with my paint sprayer. Glad to see someone else liked my wind chimes.

It looks like the oak took the stain well. Did the ply take it differently than the solid stock? Did you have to do anything special to get the uniform look?