In the process of making my tool chest I managed to knock off my odd £1 junkshop speaker from the wall and it pretty much exploded into various pieces – time to make a new housing.

The original looked like something from the Look Around You lab, painted an odd blue-grey with large attenuator dial on the top and metal grills. The speaker within was a very old ‘G.E.C’ General Electric Company (UK) speaker, after the fall I noticed a distinct lack of low end frequencies from the driver, on closer inspection it was clear the voice coil had become trapped between the central pole piece and the magnet, the fall dislodging the pole piece from its normal perfectly central location. . .tricky. Luckily it being quite an old speaker (50+yrs?) it was easily dismantled, and I had the ‘fun’ job of relocating the metal pole piece at the equilibrium point in the middle of a toroidal magnet – and then guiding the voice coil back in with out disrupting anything, alas no photos to explain it more clearly as I had my hands quite full.

Next the actual casing. The speaker was designed to work basically without a cabinet, so it would be a pretty simple build. As I had some odd ends of mahogany left over from the chest I used them to make a frame where the speaker would be the panel, then pallet wood to make the box to house it. The Chinese bluetooth amplifier circuit I’d been using survived the fall in its cardboard box, but this time I decided to fit it actually too the housing with screws, some Hessian to hide the speaker cone, glued the box bit together and job done!

I left the back open – which is a bit dangerous as its plugged directly into the mains . . but I’ll just make sure I don’t knock it off the wall again – its still probably safer than the cardboard box it was all in before.