Easy Way To Refoam Your Speakers Without Removing The Dustcap

Skip to the 6:50 mark to see the actual centering of the speaker cone.
An easy way to replace your speaker's foam surround without removing the dust cap.

[@maybeitsbecauseimalondoner3890]

You sir are a gentleman! I have a set of Acoustic Research AR18s speakers that I had professionally re-foamed well over 20 years ago at a very high price (well worth the money spent) They have completely rotted through and need re-foaming once again. I have been so apprehensive about doing this myself just because of the prospect of having to remove the dust caps! I instantly feel so much more at ease about attempting this repair now and will be purchasing a repair kit for these speakers and giving it a shot next month! Those Heybrooks are an amazing sounding set of speakers, I very nearly bought a pair about a year ago but was outbid. Thank you for making this video.

[@robertholsopple9451]

I refoam cerwin vegas. I always shim them. The tolerance in some of them is so minimal. Once that glue is dried, there is no going back. I'd rather be 100% positive that coil is straight. If your careful you can reuse the original cap and you can't even tell it was ever off. Some acetone and some heat works for cerwin vegas. I push my woofers too hard to chance it by guessing the coil is lined up. So many people are running off center coils and don't even realize it. The impedance may be off, the sound may sound muffled and so on. Simply Speakers and places like them fix people's screw ups all day long. No wonder they suggest not using shims. As for me, I'll stick with shimming my coils. It just makes sense. When I put power to that woofer, I know it can't be any more centered than it is. If this meathod in this video works for you, great. I just wouldn't trust my CV woofers to chance.

[@TADDs101]

AWESOME tips! I put new foam surrounds on my vintage EPI and Marantz speaker woofers and turned out great.

[@mantolaman]

Exactly what I was looking for. I've got a set of speakers with the foam surround completely gone, and the cone is making contact with the magnet, but the center caps are good.

[@HowardEllisonUKVoice]

Glad of the confidence-boosting video. KEF now working. Coil had been sucked literally off the cone by an amp fault. Re-stuck it to the inner former with superglue. Managed to centre spider without clever battery tricks. Used stationery-type Pritt-stik to refit surround (paper to paper, so okay), then four blobs of the same to stabilise spider while I centred it. Let that dry, then went round the perimeter with Copydex rubber glue. Q-tips not good - they shred. 'Borrowed' wife's fine artist's paintbrush. My repaired coil wires ended up reversed polarity at the tags, but so what! The music's the thing.

[@HowardEllisonUKVoice]

Few speaker repair videos give any detail on centering the SPIDER, when the dustcap can't be removed to insert shims. Looking further, I just found this: "Try connecting the coil to a 1.5v battery momentarily. That'll automatically centre the voice coil for you. An old trick but it works. No shims required". Looking forward to trying that on an old KEF chassis, once my surround glueing has dried.

[@NoferTrunions]

Bravo on the clothes pins! the oft overlooked clamp! I was preparing to do your process using tape to hold the surrounds but was concerned the tape would damage the foam. Another use for clothes pins: Holding down roofing felt edges while awaiting shingling! I felt like a genius when I figured that one out!

[@broreilly770]

Brilliant advice--thank-you!

[@flyurway]

This is the second video I've seen showing this method and in both cases you guys call clothespins clothes-pegs. New one on me! :) Anyway, nice job and thanks for actually talking and explaining what you're doing instead of, like others, playing the mime game and letting us guess!

[@missmildred9905]

Clothes-pegs is the British term for clothespins.

[@flyurway]

@@missmildred9905 Yeah, I kind of gathered that and, like any self respecting Yank, have to bust cookies on it! :-) So I learnt a new Blimey word now! :D

[@nascarsimracing1]

This is really going to help me out a ton!! My neighbor just gave me 3 10 Inch subwoofers that are from the late 90's/early 2000's. their foam is surprisingly in good shape for how old they are, and my favorite of the 3, which is my Pioneer sub, has no holes in its foam. I put RC car silicone shock oil on the foam and it seems to have made it a bit better, but later when i have money, I plan on replacing all 3 of the subs' surrounds with new foam, or even rubber if I can find some!!!! And i really did not want to have to remove the dust caps. thank you for this!!!!!!!!!

[@nathanieldonaldsonponvert3615]

Thank you for posting this. This is a great idea and will save me a lot of grief with a repair I am currently working on. I have a couple of b&o 140's that I need to replace the foam on and I was really nervous about cutting the caps. Thank you!!!

[@skidogallard]

Fantastic video and great tips, I can see your love for your speakers shine through. Cheers!

[@craignehring]

I, like you, have been sitting on a project as well. The speakers were made in France/Belgium by a company named Audax. I had a very hard time finding a suitable surround. They are rubber and close to a ten inch but in name only.The speaker cabinet(s) I built back in 1979, and is of the Transmission Line design. The surround that I have settled on was made for some driver in the UK and it is just a little big on the frame side but importantly it is also a decent overlap onto the cones edge. I can trim the outer edge off prior to the installation. Thinking back, I had bought these drivers because I knew of the problem of foam surrounds and felt that the butyl rubber would last much longer, well they began to split and tear. Thanks for the encouraging video

[@nman2563]

+Craig Nehring Good luck with your repair. Audax makes some nice drivers indeed. A reassurance is that most of the suspension comes from the spider so a surround replacement will not change the speaker characteristics much. Foam surrounds are terrible with age :(

[@jasonshepherd6255]

I dig your style brother. I did Not want to cut on the cap. That seemed like a very extreme way to replace just the foam.!! I'll be getting some clips tomorrow. Keep ya posted!

[@wounded625]

Hey! Great tutorial. You were very informative and I like the clothespin method. I have a few woofers with unique dust caps and cutting them off didn't seem right. I am going to start with the battery and maybe also use my function generator to apply a 20 Hz tone as it's curing.

[@raelenelavelle3026]

Hey man,I like your style.gonna change some vintage infinity’s out.i was stressed out about the alignment but no more ty.

[@clucking]

WHOA, are those Heybrook HB1s????? NOICE!!! Taking it oldschool. I'm using your technique for my first refoam, some old HH Scott bookshelf speakers from the early 70s I got at goodwill a few weeks back, wish me luck!

[@aCloudOfHaze]

Genius, thank you very much

[@arnehalen7487]

Thanks a lot!

[@rotemcohen6239]

does anyone heared of another technique? in which you feed the speaker directly from the amp with 50hz tone. thus the cone is moving during the process, and you glue it "on the fly" and make fine tuning on the way by pulling it to the sides. just wonder whats better/easier? does anybody tried?

[@NoferTrunions]

I've seen that "cell phone method" which works since the magnetic force will center the voice coil. But if the tube/voice coil is not perfectly round, a high point could be near rubbing, even if magnetically centered so that when some demanding passage comes along, you may get a rub. So if you center with clamps using side loads to "feel" the clearance, you could end up with greater minimum gap clearance. What I like to do and pretty much in this video is when centering, you're not so much checking that it doesn't rub, but actually determining it takes the same amount of "side" load to hear a rub. When you achieve this, you are actually centered. There is nothing either to stop you from using the clothes pin method WITH the cell phone method either. The "weak point" of the cell phone method is pressing the foam down by hand while moving. This is problematic since you can only press at points and not uniformly along the edge. If the surround is lays down nicely when at rest, by hand should work pretty good. But if there is a gap when at rest, it's harder to get right while battling glue that is setting up.

[@paulford5942]

Nice to see everything explained on your video, I live in the U.K. and you don’t see, or hear many people replacing the foam surround, it looks easy when you see someone else doing it, but I am going to try and do my own, the only thing you have not mentioned is, the name of the glue, or the type of glue used to do this. Example, it has been said by others to use pva or wood glue, can you please say what exactly to use.

[@yesterdayspapers6057]

Paul Ford Successfully replaced the surrounds in two pair of speakers. (Mission 700 series) the adhesive and surrounds provided by SimplySpeakers , l have yet to find a better adhesive and application Link : www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0ahUKEwjxpcuGy-7ZAhVJw2MKHf5zC44QFggNMAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.simplyspeakers.com%2Fspeaker-repair-adhesives.html&usg=AOvVaw21u5khhFWuvMYaIOJZ6vUk

[@kevinblack9472]

THANK YOU this saved my ass!