Divotdog
"I can fix it Grampa"
I brought these home about three years ago (Thanks Sparksaflyin, my wife thinks that you are fabulous!). After walking around them for a couple of years I figured the best way to make room in the shop was to move them into the living room.
I removed the woofers and started to strip the black paint off of them, to my surprise I found another finish under the poorly applied black latex paint, poorly applied stain and varnish over the Birch veneer and water damage on the sides! So back into the corner they go for another six months or so.
Then one day I get a PM from JonL asking me what I think of the sound of the LaScala’s that he had seen in the background of one of my TT threads (Yes Jon, you have to share some responsibility in this also!), I have to tell him “I dunno, they’re just beer can stands.” But it gets me thinking.
Along comes Jcricket, he has a set of 401 horns on barter town that a couple of folks have already offered to buy, “What the heck, I’ll get in line for these! I’ll never get ‘em anyway.” A couple of days later I get a PM that says they’re mine (Thanks Mark, my wife has a deep appreciation for you too.).
I could almost get excited about this now! All I need is a set of crossovers and all the parts are in hand for a quick, simple, inexpensive upgrade to my system. One afternoon while perusing the Klipsch forum on AK, I see that local member Jstride has just come into a set of Khorns and he is going to upgrade the crossovers with a pair of Crites crossovers, woo hoo! (My wife is now making friends all over the place).
Now it’s off to the shop to whip these bad boys together and take a listen! I wheel them out, the sawdust starts to fly, the rest of the black latex is removed, Damn! The water damage is worse than I thought; I’m going to have to replace the entire side on one of them. “Oh well,” I think in my latex induced haze, “I have to cut ‘em up anyway, I might just as well build a new horn enclosure for the squawker and the tweeter ala LaScala II.”
So off comes the rest of the paint, now they are no longer ugly, just somewhat homely.
Out comes the Sawzall and the sawdust starts to fly (Along with some blood and a few expletives) but by God we are making some headway! They are ugly again.
Well, we have the power tools out, and they are already ugly, there is no point in stopping now! I figured that I would whack the sides off and apply a little Walnut veneer, the wife walked out in the shop once during this operation, took one look, started shaking her head and just quietly went back in the house.
Now all that was left to do was to veneer and attach the new sides, and build the horn boxes, by this time there was so much blood and cursing that I forgot to take any more pictures for awhile, but here we are with drivers installed and out for the first test run!
