Here we are almost a year and a half later and I finally replaced the caps in my L100s. I used a modified version of Brad's method to remove the Masonite board from the front baffle in order to access the caps. Instead of using a hole saw with right angle attachment, using a mirror and headlight, I used a multi-tool with the blade mounted at 90° and cut the corner of the board with the inaccessible screw which releases the board once the other 3 screws that are accessible were removed.
The wires that are connected to the caps are old and brittle, so I had to be careful not to break them when stripping the casing. One kept breaking so I replaced the entire wire. To remove the existing caps, I used a multi tool to cut thru the glue on the old caps. I just slide the blade between the cap and the board while cutting. The friction from the blade causes some melting and smearing of the old glue but not a big deal. I use extra strength hot glue to fasten the new caps to the original Masonite board.
Now to re-mount the woofer. This is where I ran into some problems. The front baffle is made from 2 layers of cheapo particle board. The woofer is mounted to the inner layer which is cut smaller than the outer layer in order to create a lip (Typical). There are T-Nuts pressed into the back of the inner layer to receive the mounting screws of the woofer. This method is very common in speaker box building. The problem was, several of the T-Nuts dislodged from the particle board when trying to remove the woofer. I had to epoxy the T-Nuts back in place. Getting the T-Nut back in the exact same location was challenging and necessary in order for the screws to line up. I replaced the original screws with stainless steel ones. With everything finally back together, I fired them up. Note: I did do a side-by-side comparison after the first speaker and before the second to see if there was any audible difference the replaced caps made. (A friend of my brother's father gave us each a pair of L100s that he bought new in the mid-70s. My brother was visiting from out of town during this recap job and for the comparison.) We are both audiophiles who have, between us, recapped probably 10 pairs of speakers. I would say that every one of them prior to this one showed either some improvement or a lot of improvement in SQ. To our disappointment, we heard no difference whatsoever. It made my brother re-prioritize re-capping his pair when he gets home. I'm still glad I did it but not sure if I would have done the job knowing what the final results were going to be. I would think that 50 year old caps would have failed by now. Don't get me wrong, the speakers still sound great but I was expecting them to sound even better. Oh well.
