I'm getting close to finally wrapping up my speaker project, it's taken me a lot longer than I expected, mainly because it's spent most of the time in various forms of incompleteness sitting on my work bench neglected.
The construction process was pretty straight forward, made my clay version, sliced it up, transfered the forms to wood and rebuilt it all.
First mistake I made was trying to cut corners and use a Dremel, which was a complete waste of time and ended up taking more time than a good rasp would have.
Once everything was test fitted I ended up deciding to go for a darker stain, which required me using General's Java Gel stain, which works pretty well when trying to stain a light wood to look like a dark wood. Unlike a oil based stain the gel stain works more like a paint and sits on the surface. Having gone through the process it would have been a lot better to just start with a darker variety.
For the varnish I used Rockhard Table Top Varnish from Behlen's. The finish isn't perfect yet, will probably redo it since there is quite a bit of swirl right now. 
