Last week as the edge foam surround finely gave up the ghost! It was messy affair doing this, I can’t say I was pleased but that’s the fact of foam surround does suck and it’s only got short expectance lifespan until it just crumbles in you’re fingertips.
So what did I use I cannibalised a 6 ½ rubber edge surround off some other JBL bass mid drivers that I brought for a few quid a few months back, I stripped the edge rubber of using a sharp knife to pile back just a small amount so I can take the outer part away from the basket.
Next I used the knife underneath the cone to pile back some rubber until I had completely removed the whole rubber intact. Now I was out of glue and while I was doing this task at around 8pm in the evening until late, it wasn’t until about 10.50pm that took a breather a short walk up the road to Sam’s food store to see if they had any glue that would be tacky enough to stick and hold together the rubber with the cone and basket.
Paper glue was all they had, would you believe that, so I brought it anything thing I’ll try anything to make this work.
So far it was sticky enough to hold but for how long and under what temperature conditions over the strength of time? I kinder aborted that type of glue and then popped over to the Co-Op and they had all purpose glue which I tried so far so good its hold but we’ll she, hold?
The mess it was make was unbelievable lucky I had a kitchen tissue to wipe the mess up as I was plodding along slowly and trying to get the rubber to stay in place at the right position needed many fingers to shape it, well I’m no octopus, but I did manage to figure out one thing.
By placing the rubber closely to near the right shape expect for one part, I placed the gasket parts down to hold it in place and then a DVD-Rom drive on top of it and left it for an hour.
Now that’s better now I can work this thing into shape with the glue, with the underneath part glued to the cone and the rubber glued down to the basket and the gaskets glued down and held down into position with some weight placed on top it.
After leaving it for an hour it was time to check the JBL bass mid driver out by hold it up to some light and looking underneath the basket with one eye closed and rotating it while looking for any stray light passing though where the rubber holds to the cone.
Yes I saw a few spots that I dealt with quickly and after checking and checking again it was ready to be fitted back into the enclosure.
I ran a few sine wave low frequency tests with the port hole plugged up to make it airtight, I played a 16Hz tone a 32Hz tone a 125Hz tone and 250Hz it was holding together. I also tested it side by side with another JBL Control 5 using the same speaker lead, via swapping the leads around and placing the SPL db meter close to JBL Control 5 it passed.
So why in the world doesn’t JBL use rubber edge surround on all there JBL Control 5 rather than edge foam surround, foam is pants.
I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked, I just don’t what to think about it sucked.