Greetings all!
Longtime (over a decade!) lurker, and with the state of the world being what it is, tacking a project I've long had on my mind.
Bit of an intro and background about me and my love affair with B&O—
Some years ago, I moved across the country for college, and of course, the first thing I did was swing by the local Goodwill for housewares and the like. In the basement cluttered in a sad heap was, to 18-year old me, an unexpected grail: Beomaster 1900 in rosewood with matching S45 speakers, and a slightly newer and rougher Beogram 2000.
"$20.Doesn't work" stickered on it. I flipped it over and saw the fuse was missing, and what luck, there was a RadioShack across the street.. A quick trip over and back, and a sawbuck later, I was lugging the whole thing onto the subway (and then onto the used record store).
The setup definitely looked rough, but kept me entertained through college and the years since—at one point I shared an apartment with two other audiophiles, and it kept up with the vintage Marantz and Harman/Kardon rigs we had around the place. Some people had ragers on the weekend; we had Trader Joes wine-and-listening parties.
In the intervening years, I've upgraded when I can. The 1900 started smoking one evening, and while I don't remember the fate of the carcass, it was replaced with an estate-sale BM2000 to match the turntable. The Beogram got a little creaky and was retired for an SL1200, another fortuitous garage-sale find, but is still in storage somewhere.
And that left those trusty Beovox S45s. Cabinets could use some love, and the grille cloth definitely seen better days, but the drivers and surrounds were solid, and just about perfect for my tiny living room.
Then, of course, disaster struck again. I went on an extended trip and my ex, who offered to watch the place, didn't do the best job... Among other things, one, just one, of the speakers was destroyed. The grille was torn off the fret, there was a small hole punched into the phase link driver, and, for reasons still left for the ages, the whole damn thing leaning up against a wall heater.
Thankfully the place didn't burn down, the cat was still alive, and there wasn't much else damaged, but the molded resin back was warped beyond belief, curving so much it split the MDF lip. That was about five years ago, and I just couldn't bear to bin them after 15 years. They've done a passable job hooked up to the television, and left my headphones for critical listening.
Now I'm a real grown-up in my 30s, and can afford to start from scratch with a whole new setup, and some of the tiny boutique components at my local dealer are tempting. But after poking around here for the last few weeks and seeing how much love there is for these models, I figured it's worth seeing how far I get performing surgery.
So on to the project:
This particular pair are the earlier model 6302, angled resin back, with 6 mounting points for horizontal/vertical/angled permutations. Apparently some in this series had two hanging hooks, and still others threaded inserts for the later S45-2 stands. I've heard some disparaging reports that the -2 models were pretty flimsy cabinets owing to the MDF back, but I can say that's not true here.
Before anything else, I needed to tackle the back panel just to see if this was even feasible before I thought of buying new components. Thankfully the main structure of the cabinet is more or less intact, and nothing is too scorched. I wasn't sure what specific resin these are constructed of, thermoplastic, or thermoset, but we'll soon find out...
(excuse the awful cell photos. Would you believe I'm a professional photographer?)
Home Depot is still open, and I made a quick trip over for a cheap heat gun, which, strangely, lists creme brûlée as an ideal use, along with paint stripping...nothing about 50 year old speakers!
Ove Gloves on and the range hood cranked, and I started blasting it. Woof. Not a great smell. It didn't occur to me to take the drivers and batting out.
Biohazard. Uck. Smells like burning hair.
Some small semblance of success! The trick was to evenly heat up the warped section, but not to the point of it becoming tacky. I made that mistake, and my glove made an imprint, as you can see on the left. The bubbles weren't from this procedure, but blistering from the original heater incident.
It's still lumpy, rather than the crisp angular profile befitting Beosystem, but I am going to give it another go using some scrap sheet and metal bar to form it back, and sand smooth. If you look closely, theres a sag right in the middle up front, and a bit of a bulge further back on the left. The challenge is to gently shape that down while keeping the side from bulging out.
Working with this stuff softened is a weird texture. A bit like bread dough. If you've worked with molten glass or steel, very similar.
Then there's the mounting hooks. Gruesome. Once I have access to a metal shop again, I plan on building some S45-2 style stands, per dimensions found on past threads. McMaster-Carr has plastic-specific rivet nuts that will do nicely. I've got time to maybe devise a more aesthetically interesting stand and a more elegant pivoting bracket. Putting that architecture degree to use...
Then there's the slight problem of the missing MDF. A small piece of pine trim wood should slot in here. Glue suggestions once I'm finished? I'm loathe to use Gorilla Glue for the mess, so I'm thinking a bit of silicone to damp and standard wood glue.
Inside, there's really not too much warping and no heat damage. That's some thick material. I don't think this will affect it acoustically; it'll just look ugly as sin on the back. But you can hide the back, right?
Er...
Both cabs need a good cosmetic refinishing, pronto. The rest of my furniture is period-appropriate modern, but these are the embarrassments in the living room. I'd like to say they were like this when I got them (and they definitely had seen better days), but I wasn't always the best at packing for moves...
__
On to the drivers.
Tweeters look good. Philips mylar domes. Nothing to see here.
Onto the phase link.
I wish I'd taken a before photo, but it looked gruesome. A good inch-long rip from the surround inward. Ever since architecture school, I keep a bottle of Aileen's handy—everything Gorilla Glue wishes it was—and that's just the prescription, going on past wisdom. Applied perhaps a bit too heavy with a toothpick, but it's holding without extra reinforcement. It looks like it's applied a lot thicker than it is. I hope this doesn't color the sound too much, but these drivers seem to be fairly plentiful on eBay if it doesn't work out.
Excuse the decade of cat hair. These are still sticky. The other half of the pair is still relatively clean.
Now, how about those woofers?
As I said before...woof. And it gets worse.
It's been said on here that the butyl surrounds are relatively trouble-free. Apparently not always. From what I can gather, the brackets weren't located properly at the edges and bit into the surrounds, and cracks have worked their way around. Some Capt. Tolleys Creeping Crack Cure, quite possibly the other wonder glue in my drawer, is holding them relatively steady until I can work up the nerve to re-foam them.
Unfortunately, both drivers fell to this fate.
Putting them back together will be a challenge to avoid the same problem. The existing hole can probably be epoxied just to be safe, and the proper screw location will be well far behind it—about where the indentation from the old bracket is, if you can see it.
Magnets epoxied top and bottom (and just a teeny bit of overspill, but nothing on the cones!). Amazingly didn't come loose after a 3000-mile truck ride.
—
Next step: get into the guts. The entirety of the weekend was spent researching and compiling parts for the electronics.
Down the rabbit hole of capacitor and resistor discussions. Trying to determine the discrepancy between the service manual (15µF caps) and whats actually inside mine and a few others' (16µF). Trying to find reasonably priced 16s. Trying to remember high school physics to figure out if this matters.
In the end, I decided to go with 15µF Clarity Cap PXs. It's a close match with 10% tolerance, and 16s seemingly only come in cheap electrolytic or very expensive varieties. Parts Express doesn't have the middle-ground Solens in stock (at least as many as I need for both speakers), and won't for a while.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable of B&O history, and experienced with crossover design, can explain the discrepancy and the expected end result.
I figure in for a penny, in for a pound, and since some of the resistors look a bit crispy, those are going, too. Madisound's website isn't the easiest to navigate if you're looking for a specific component value, but I was able to get sets of Mundorf metal-oxide resistors for all of them at a very reasonable cost.
Now the fun part is going to be rewiring these birdsnest boards with new giant caps, especially that 7-way junction on the common ground. Has anyone given a shot at optimizing the layout on a new board? I feel like at the very least, a terminal strip might help in reassembly.
Finally, since I'm already tearing these apart, I went ahead and ordered new hookup and interconnection wire, batting, and 5-way terminal cups.
—
Hope you're still with me. Big project for my inaugural post, and I'm going all out. They're not in the worst shape I've seen here (see: burnt S75s, that S45, so hopefully they'll be good as new once I'm through.
In researching this, I've seen plenty of posts on re-foaming, re-capping, re-wiring, and refinishing as individual projects. Not a lot of complete overhauls covering all of the above! Between the damaged cone and resin, I've been wondering if this whole project was an exercise in throwing good money after bad. A few older posts I've come across have called the mighty S45 'a dime a dozen,' in their ubiquity, and yet at least in 2020, I'm not seeing them up for sale often.
Right now, I see a pair of 6302s in good, all-original shape, and even a single one sans-fret for about the same price; with tax and shipping, they come out to over $200—almost double what I'm spending on this project. And I'd still want to perform the same upgrades, so I'd be spending more on top of it. Fixing the resin is just a small part of a bigger project, and it makes me feel less guilty cutting holes for stands and terminals, anyway!
And besides, find me a new set of speakers with comparable clarity and presence, not to mention good looks for under $200. They're perfect for my little living room—bigger than bookshelves, smaller than towers, match my furniture (most important thing, of course)..
Any advice or tips are appreciated, of course. I'll leave you with one last photo of future projects—sprucing up the BM2000, and giving a little love to a CD3300 local record store gave me for free to take off their hands.
