Battle: Guitar Speaker Mod
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.
I unscrew it, cut the wires, and label them.
Step 2: Pull Speaker
I soldered on this wire previously. Cut it. Unscrew 4 speaker screws and pull out speaker.
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.
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 my wires. solder em in place. pop the plug back together.
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.
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.
So 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.