Repairing a Speaker Cone Using Hot Glue

Any time I can avoid a recone of a speaker, I do. Reconing a speaker can sometimes restrict the speaker from being able to reproduce all the same overtones and harmonics it once did. As a speaker ages, much like an aged acoustic guitar top, it becomes more flexible and more capable of reproducing the nuance in a musical performance. Heavy doping or a brand new, stiff cone can make a performance sound lifeless.

There are a lot of ideas out there about how a repair procedure should be done, but I do not agree with most of them. While some suggest using layers of paper towels or regular paper whetted with Elmer's white glue or yellow wood glue, I tend to think those glues dry way to brittle for this purpose as a long-lasting repair.

Others use silicone with good results, but silicone take a long time to cure - usually hours - while hot glue cures pretty much immediately, and after curing, silicone is nearly impossible to remove or manipulate further. Not so with hot glue.

Hot glue repairs are long-lasting, flexible, and if not overly-done, practically musically transparent.