Many people think that if a woofer has a ripped cone or the cone is seized up that it’s destroyed, but it’s possible to resurrect it yourself with only a little patience and the proper replacement parts. You can easily recone a speaker today and it’s easier than ever thanks to the premade kits available, especially for the popular speakers like JBL, Jensen, Yamaha, EV and various hi-fi brands.
A quick Google search will provide a number of sources for recone kits, but the video below comes from SimplySpeakers.com and shows how it’s done. ReconingSpeakers.com, reconekits.com, and speakerworks.com are a few other alternatives, although I can’t personally say whether one is better than another since I’ve not used them all.
What I do know is that you shouldn’t be afraid to try to recone your speaker these days. Although kits have been available even going back to the 1960s, you had to send to the manufacturer to get one, and the chances where high that you’d get the wrong one since there are so many models. That most likely won’t happen today since everything is well documented online.
It was also somewhat common for the major studio facilities to do their own speaker repair on-site in the bygone days of large maintenance departments. I can remember back in the 1980s Cherokee Studios in Hollywood had what they called “Speaker World,” which was a large room at the back of the facility where all the reconing took place. That studio definitely needed it because all of the woofers of the speakers in a room would be replaced at the end of every client booking.
As you’ll see, if you’re good with glue and aligning things precisely, you shouldn’t have a problem doing this yourself as long as you have a little patience. And it’s a whole lot cheaper than buying a brand new speaker or farming the job out to a speaker repair shop. Check out the video below.
