Battle: Guitar Speaker Mod

Speaker Cab from Organ

Nothing too special – I have a vintage speaker cabinet from an organ. I plugged a guitar amp into it, and like how it looks. However my new amp pushes the speaker a bit too hard, and I get some weird distortion noises.. sounds like paper flapping when you are blowing a speaker.

So I am going to:

  • Remove speaker
  • Fix wiring
  • Add new speaker
  • hope shit works

Step 1: Remove the volume control.

Currently there is a cool looking, but useless ( and possibly dangerous ) volume control on the back. It has a series of resistors, and lets you dial down volume. I might be over reacting here, but I don’t want to push my volume from an amp into a resistor.

Does look cool as hell though.

IMG_9810-1000IMG_9808-1000

I unscrew it, cut the wires, and label them.

Step 2: Pull Speaker

IMG_9809-1000

I soldered on this wire previously. Cut it. Unscrew 4 speaker screws and pull out speaker.IMG_9812-1000

It has a weird secondary cone which I assume is to help with treble? I suspect this is what was making the “blown out” paper noise when distortion was ripping through it.

IMG_9814-1000

Here we have our speaker markings. A little internet sleuthery and I’m seeing:

“old extension cabinet for the reverb unit from a hammond organ.”

“additional numbers on the rim are AO-22760-0 and 15586, on cone is has 42H3002.I came out of a Hammond Reverb speaker unit.”

“carefuly it might only be 10-12 watt speaker” ( which would explain me the “blowing out” noises.. I might have been doing exactly that.)

 Step 3: Rewire

I won’t have the new speaker until tomorrow, so in the meantime I’m going to prep one side of my speaker wires to plug into my amp. Luckily I have some sample speaker connectors I got like a year ago as part of an auction lot. Knew those fuckers would come in handy…

tin wires

Tin my wires. solder em in place. pop the plug back together.

assemble cable solder

Step 4: Insert new speaker

I tried to be clever and use spade connectors on the new speaker, but the .250 ones are fractionally too large. So I just soldered all that shit together.

Dropped speaker in box. 4 screws. ready to rocknrollerball.

vintage modern IMG_9836-1000

 

 

I _might_ adjust the back of this cab by adding in 1/4 inch speaker jack plug. However, the only one I’ve found so far is 2 inch outer diameter, and not sure what inner dimensions are. Not sure I want to damage the original speaker cabinet.

Black-Metal-Jack-Ferrule-Single-1-4-imageSo that will probably be my next mod.

SCORES:

Cost: good. reused old shit. paid $30 for the new speaker. +5
Time Spent: Fast. got the whole thing done in an hour or so, counting driving time to buy speaker on Craigs List +5
Quality: its ok. works. not amazing looking yet, and my soldering still sort of sucks.

Overall: Victory. Clean and simple.

Admittedly this was pretty easy, and just involved sticking different stuff together. I got lucky in a few areas, including the speaker screw holes being the same.

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