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Sunday 11 November 2012

Rain, cables and bloodshed

Last day of the weekend, pissy weather outside. It has been raining non-stop the whole day. Better spend some time working on the speakers then.

My goal for today was to prepare all cables to the drivers and maybe solder then to the filter. I'm happy to say I achieved most of that, except soldering the cables.

I started off with searching for the cable shoe tool. I know exactly what the box looks like and where it should be but for some reason it wasn't there. Eventually I found it, after searching for almost 20 minutes in the workshop, the garage and in the car.

Time to start stripping insulation of cables and mounting them cable shoes.
All tools ready!
The result. As you can see I've started to remove a bit more of the insulation to make the cables easier to handle.

First cable finished! I'm leaving the insulation in the other ends for now. I'll strip it off when I'm soldeirng the cables to filter.
I must say the cable feels very high quality!
All cables done!

Another close up of the cables. I used to masking tape on the tweeter cables to prevent them from untwisting themselves.
Cable shoe for the tweeter cables. Pressed this one a bit too hard so it broke. But I think it still has connectivity.

Now you might wonder why I put "bloodshed" in the title. I'll explain...
After having done two woofer cables I was going to strip some more insulation off a cable. I put the knife to the cable and pressed with the side of my thumb on the knife. The problem was, I had the knife the wrong way, edge pointing upwards, so I cut myself in the thumb. About one centimeter long and a couple of millimeters deep. It was bleeding quite a bit but thankfully it didn't hurt much at all. This led to an hour's break while I was stopping the bleeding and making sure I could keep working without the wound opening again. I solved it with some cotton pads and a bit of masking tape to hold in in place.

As I have mentioned before I need to glue the coils to the filter board. The coils are quite heavy (probably 300-400g) and wont stay in place by themselves. I found some glue in a drawer and decided to try it out.


Glueing in process, holding the coil in place with a clamp.


One thing struck me just before writing this post. I may have made the cables too short. Well, they are long enough to go from the filter to the drivers, that's no problem, but I probably wont be able to pull out the drivers when the box is finished. If I'm lucky I'll be able to pull the drivers out far enough to get a grip of the cable shoes and pull them off the driver terminals. If not, well, it will be quite difficult to do any modifications to the filter or inside in general.

I do have around three meters of cable left though, so it would be possible to make new cables for the upper woofers and take the old upper woofer cable and use them for the lower woofer. But for that I'd need new cable shoes. I do have cable shoes in my blue litte metal box but I'm not sure if they are the right size. I will take a look at that tomorrow and ask Ingvar if it's a good idea to do so or if I wont have to.

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