Learning speaker reconing?

[doc]

Anybody here learn to recone their own speakers? Supposedly this is a "don't try this at home" situation, but I have a couple I need to fix and it would be nice to learn a new skill. Any advice?

[UR12]

Anybody here learn to recone their own speakers? Supposedly this is a "don't try this at home" situation, but I have a couple I need to fix and it would be nice to learn a new skill. Any advice?

I use to recone speakers years ago when you could still buy the parts to do it. It seems no one is willing to sell parts (Cones/VC/spiders/ Dust caps/glue) anymore. Yamaha used to sell kits for their white cone speakers and so did Cerwin Vega. I guess now that some of the glue is considered a toxic chemical or can be used as explosive, it is harder to ship. Don't really know for sure. JBL wanted you to fly out to CA on your own dime and go to their school to learn how to recone their way or they won't sell you parts. Same for Waldom. They make kits for everyone's speakers (Or used to) but they want you to spend thousands of dollars to become one of their reconing centers before they will sell you parts. You might try simplyspeakers.com. They do sell some kits for DIY reconing.

[hot_tube_tone]

Give http://www.recone.com (http://www.recone.com/) a try. They have a video that you could get to learn the skill. I don't know if it covers where to source parts.

[OOG]

talk to Ted Weber

btw
most people here don't know that before he became a "Blues Icon"
James Harmon was the long haired hippy speaker recone guy at Orange County Speaker

[mbratch]

I believe Ted Weber sells speaker reconing parts on his web site.

[Chrome Dinette]

This is not as hard as you might think. The hardest part is in the cleaning/prepping of the old frame, as far as I am concerned.

As long as you have the right parts and pay attention to what you are doing, it is not that hard.

I used to do a ton of reconing when I worked for a sound reinforcement company. A lot of companies' recone kits were only two parts, the cone/voice coil/spider and the dust cap. Those are a breeze. The ones you have to assemble from individual parts weren't that hard to deal with, though.

[Structo]

keeping the voice coil centered would seem to be the hardest part.
Seems I read that you should use some kind of shim to keep it even around it before you glue the surround.

[Chrome Dinette]

keeping the voice coil centered would seem to be the hardest part.
Seems I read that you should use some kind of shim to keep it even around it before you glue the surround.

Yes, usually multiple shims evenly spaced between the coil and the center part of the magnet are used.