Thrift find: Early Polk Monitor 10s.

JRhoBurton

JRhoBurton

All roads lead to music
No luck thrifting today, until the third stop, where
I spied an early Polk Monitor 10. Very dirty, no badge, and dang, only 1. I used the nearby men's room, then wandered toward the record and tape shelf. Wait. Is that the other one in an unrelated aisle? Sure enough. I snagged them.

20210801_175841.jpg

20210801_175244.jpg

20210801_175707.jpg

20210801_175635.jpg

20210801_175615.jpg

20210801_175551.jpg

20210801_175532.jpg

I am refurbing the Mon 4s I bought long ago, with similar tweeters. Those have way out-of-spec caps. I will probably need to at least recap these. They pass the battery thump test. An enjoyable find.
 
Register to hide this ad
Wow! Great find, especially with the peerless tweeters!

Sounds like no seized woofers if it passed the battery test and ALL woofers moved. That's a lot of quality speaker for the money. They're also easy to recap and it makes a big difference.
 
Quick and dirty test. No highs. Tweeter fuses blown. AGC 1.5a. I have a lot of fuses. Not those, but I popped in a pair of 1a for testing and now they are good. Singing nicely on all cylinders. Woo-hoo!

20210801_190330.jpg

I still need to order caps for the 4's, so I will hold off and include some for these.
 
A little research shows these are 1st gen 10's, which might be the most sought-after.

Polk had not started using the term "monitor" yet. They are just "Model 10". The woofer and passive baskets are silver in color. The woofers have external gaskets. The passive has an uncoated diaphragm. These would have to be older than my Monitor 4's.
 
Make sure you run a few beads of epoxy around the magnets of the midbass drivers. I know someone that just bought a pair with two frozen drivers due to the magnets shifting. At some point recap the crossovers. I found a few caps out of spec in my 10 series 2's or B's, whatever they call them. Nice score on those. :thumbsup: Also put them on short stands. They sound best up off the floor.
 
Lavane said:
Make sure you run a few beads of epoxy around the magnets of the midbass drivers. I know someone that just bought a pair with two frozen drivers due to the magnets shifting. At some point recap the crossovers. I found a few caps out of spec in my 10 series 2's or B's, whatever they call them. Nice score on those. :thumbsup: Also put them on short stands. They sound best up off the floor.
Click to expand...


LOL, yup, thats me! This is a lot better buy than my $50 set with two frozen drivers.

To the OP, I found out from my speaker guy that parts for the Polks have gone up DOUBLE from just a few months ago. A year ago the price to rebuild a driver was around $40 and now it is almost $80.
 
Yes I am still working on these. I saw the previous post and did a double take when I saw it was 2021, not 2022. Wow, time flies.

I am attaching 3/4 inch oak to top, bottom, and sides. I have no dust collector for the new 1/2 inch router, so had to wait for good weather to work outside.

IMG_20230416_130538.jpg
 
I have not forgotten this project, and returned to it a few days ago. (So much to do, so little time.) I am continuing to cut the eight oak pieces for tops, bottoms, and sides.

I was wondering what the "most authentic" replacement material would be for the gray caulk used to seal the drivers to the baffle. Not important really, but it would be nice to stay close to the original stuff.

20240717_194736.jpg

20240717_194728.jpg
 
Nice!

JRhoBurton said:
..I was wondering what the "most authentic" replacement material would be for the gray caulk used to seal the drivers to the baffle. Not important really, but it would be nice to stay close to the original stuff.
Click to expand...

Hopefully @F1nut will stop by to offer up an answer for this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom