The free trunk after a little work.

Ever since I scored some great vintage camera gear the other week, I’ve been keeping my eye on the Craigsist free section in Marin for any potential finds, and today I came up lucky.  It was advertised just as ‘Old Steamer Trunk’.  No picture, no further description.  Just a phone number, which I called within 8 minutes of the ad being posted.  I was already the 2nd person to call, but they weren’t able to pick up the trunk right away.  Just my luck – so off to San Rafael (just 5 miles up the road).

The trunk was definately cool looking, huge and dusty.  A bonus though – it included the key to the lock.  I was able to fit it in the Saab without problems, thanks to the fact that is has the roofless option.  The ulitity of this car (1993 Saab 900 Convertible) is suprising.

So, I got the trunk home, cleaned it off with a wet rag, rubbed some furniture polish on it, then some wax and put it in the living room.  Above is the ‘after’ pic, here’s the ‘before’.

Trunk in the Saab

The offending capacitors on the B&W 600 speaker.

I bought some great (I thought) speakers at a thrift shop on Valencia in San Francisco the other day.  Amidst all the usual crap Sanyo and Matsui plastic junk, I spotted some all black speakers on the bottom shelf with the B&W badge.  Knowing that they make a quality speakers, I overlooked the holes in the speaker grill and the bruised corners and took them the checkout to pay my $25 finders fee.

They felt nice and heavy, and when I plugged them into my Beomaster 1900 amp, they sounded pretty good.  Until I moved the balance control over to the left speaker.  All mids and lows, but no highs.  I removed the grill and confirmed my suspicion – the tweeter wasn’t working.  I opened up the speaker and, woah, just a loose wire.  The red wire wasn’t connected at all, so I connected it and waited for victory.  But it didn’t come, still nothing out of the tweeter.

All the blue caps will be replaced.

So I opened up the speaker again and took out all the soundproofing.  I looked at the connection box, and spotted the problem.  The capacitor had a white ooze all over it, and the plastic underneath it was melted.  It seemed to me that, in audio nerd speak, ‘the caps were blown’.

After a little consulting at AudioKarma.com a friendly audio expert reccmmended some new caps for me.

Since the 2.2 ohm 5W resistor was in the trouble zone, I would just replace it. The issue looks like it was caused by the resistor getting too hot.
If you want to, you can replace the 2.2 ohm resistor with a single Mills 2 ohm resistor, rather than 2 resistors to get an exact value, I didn’t know how anal you are about getting things perfect (I am)

Okay, so order two of these http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-242
two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-238
and two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-244
and two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/show…rtnumber=005-2

So, there you have it, my next project.  Stay tuned.