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Speaker Cone tear- repair

T

tedgolf

New Member
I have 15 inch electrovoice speakers that were in storage.

One of the speakers as about a 1.5 inch long tear in the cone from the connection point to the surround at the large diameter in an almost straight line towards the center of the cone.

Somewhere on the internet I read about using nail polish to coat the tear and thus stop it progressing.

Anyone have any experience or should I simply replace the cone?

Thanks

t.mcquinn@newtahrach.com
 
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I presume it is a paper pulp type cone- I would use a small swatch of a paper towel glued in place with a good wood glue- on the back side of the cone. I have done this with good success!
DC
 
My choice would be coffee filter + Aleene's Tacky Glue. If you tear the coffee filter material, you get a great little "deckle" edge that glues down nice.
 
The suggestions for glue above, are good... but be sure you're not dealing with an overly BRITTLE cone.

I've had problems with EVM15B and EVM15L drivers, that had cones that had degraded... and become so brittle, that they would just disintegrate. In the end, they would start cracking with nothing but normal audio input.

If the crack tends to propagate, if the edges are flexed, then the cone is probably going to be need to be replaced... a recone would be in order, in that case.

Regards,
Gordon.
 
me, too... just used this to perform a hypothetical :-) surround puncture on a fullrange driver with good results.

One ply "toilet tissue" and nail polish is another good, old-fashioned repair strategm.
 
I use Aleene's Fabric Fusion on paper cone tears (and to coat cloth surrounds).
It is a FLEXIBLE fabric adhesive.
It has worked quite well for me with numerous vintage speakers.

Steve
 
If you need to use some sort of brace, clamp or wedge to hold bits together and are worried about gluing it to the cone, you can cover the bits you don't want stuck with tinfoil. Elmers wood glue doesn't stick to it.
When I was a kid I used to like to build things with toothpicks and popsicle sticks. I always built on aluminium foil to avoid problems. :thmbsp:
 
I've done a thin glaze of "hot glue" via a hot glue gun before, if the crack is small enough. Not sure if it was for better or worse, but the HPM-1100's are still holding up thus far. :-/
 
When I've had to repair a cone I use watered down glue so its easier to apply with a small watercolor size brush. Multiple coats of thin glue worked better for me than one thick coat YMMV.
 
It was somewhat a pain to do "plastic surgery" on hpm-100 midrange as the hole was right between one of the solder points and a little beyond the edge of the cone. I had to use tweezers to carefully insert wet pieces into the unscrewed terminal opening. I used a couple of combined tips from the above: split (brand name) paper towel pieces and 50/50 diluted Aleen's glue because it has a good tackiness. Diluted glue has a little bit hard time sticking to the cone at first, so it may be necessary to wait a little when it starts drying (3-5 min. maybe) then it seems to stick better. Torn edges also can be leveled at this time. Diluted glue was not too runny, so, I don't think I added too much water. Now it looks pretty solid. Bumps on paper towel give it additional rigidity, so no need to use more than two layers, I think. I got some dark "veins" on the cone from the glue getting between the torn edges which reminds me Dr. Frankenstein work :) , but the surface feels pretty solid and smooth, too. If that could be masked somehow; some matched flat paint probably would work. Oh, and yes, one of the tiny wires to the voice coil was broken off because that black epoxy also got cracked, but it's soldered back to its solder point on the cone after everything got dried. Next thing is testing.
 
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