Monday, February 27, 2012

Spiders and Voice Coils

Here is an example of a spider,/voice coil, and lead wires.  This eventually became the speaker that's pictured above.  The white glue was removed and the spider as well.  The voice coil was still good so I experimented with spiders, cones and a red Cerwin-Vega surround.
 You can see how they are glued together.  The paper cone has been removed from this assembly.  Note how the flexible wires pass through the leftover piece of cone material.

This is a JBL D-130F during the recone process, before gluing.
Can you see the clear plastic shims that hold the voice coil in place?
The copper ribbons lay onto the cone after the cone is glued in place.



Here's how the wire looks coming through the cone to the speaker terminals.


Working EV coil, Weber spider and flex wire, salvaged cone.
If you're lucky, you can find a pre-assembled speaker recone kit that looks something like this one by searching for 'recone kits'.
Except I didn't glue on the surround yet in this photo, which would be included in a pre-glued kit.
The surround goes around the edge of the cone and is glued to the frame at the same time as the spider.
The white stains on the coil are from fumes given off by the super glue.
I use a slow setting, 1 to 5 minutes, rubberized cyanoacrylate by Loctite to attach the coil,cone and spider to each other.  This must be done withe parts carefully alligned in the correct position on the frame with shims holding the voice coil in place. The coil of wire must be centered in the magnetic field.
This unit was fitted to an EV 12" frame.


This is what happens to a voice coil when the magnet shifts in a Mackie horn driver.


You can see that the gap is a different size in the two photos.  Maybe not so obvious but the voice coil was pinched and the only way to fix  this is to have a very large and expensive machine to demagnetize the
magnet, re-position it and glue it, then re-magnetize. I just got a new one instead for $75.  Don't bother with shifted magnets unless you have an extremely rare and valuble speaker that can't be replaced.






The speaker cabinet must have taken a violent fall to break off this part of the horn and shift the magnet.


I was able to solder that tiny wire on this vintage hi-fi tweeter..
You can't tell by the pic but that coil is only about a half inch accross.

3 comments:

  1. VERY cool. I have a 60s Jensen, power used to run to it, got a little transformer on it, and an Electrovoice about the same vintage. Jimi Hendrix (prolly Billy Cox really) blew it. Maybe you can post about what happens inside the speaker when that happens, and repairs?

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  2. That transformer is usually for 70 volt operation which is a way to string lots of speakers together on one amp. Try bypassing it and check the speaker with a battery (touch to the terminals briefly.
    If its blown its probably due to overpowering which can burn the wire in the voice coil. A recone is the way to repair it.

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