Too Cherry to Chop???

OK the shot of the King isn't really that important but it was in my "to be blogged" image folder and the following talk of cherries and chopping made it sort of fit.


The real reason of this post is to talk about the Altec 15's. For some time I have been looking for a dead sample to examine the magnet structure. After a few misses on ebay for too much money these showed up on Craigslist. The asking price was low so I decided to go get 'em. I agreed on $45 for the two and when the guy fired them up it was horrible. Both drivers were flawless. The front driver is an alnico 418 and the rear a ceramic 421. When thinking about getting them home I realized I now had a problem. I had two vintage drivers that were functional and my goal was simply to come out of the deal with at least one driver in need of a re-cone.

As my friend Aron and I carried the drivers across Roosevelt Avenue in Queens a gut in an old red SUV yelled "Hey want any more of that Altec stuff?" I replied yes, I'm looking for a dead 416 or 515. He said he had a ton of Altec stuff and needs to unload it. He rattled off a list of woofers, compression drivers and multi-cell horns that mad me drool. Then went on to talk about dynaco tube amps and other kit that he pulled out of service and tossed on a shelf. We exchanged info and i'll give him a shout next week and try to meed up. Stay tuned! (if any of you have a 416 or 515 in need of a recone pop Jeffrey or me a note and we can work something out)


The project of the day was to get the Lowther Field Coils installed into the bigfun cabinets. In order to do this I needed to add a bit of an extension to the front baffle and while making sawdust I realized that the driver would now see a very different baffle for support in the 300-400hz range and the sound showed it.


The stopgap solution was simple. I had to keep the extension to the for fear of a collapse but once the glue is dry on the extensions, the extra weight of the extension shouldn't be a problem.

dave