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Grado sr80i - Soldering part loose

post #1 of 8
2/15/11 at 8:47am
Thread Starter 

Hey guys, 

 

I am having problems with the recabling of the Grados. 

 

First I thought that I had a broken cable, but after soldering the ends it seems like there is something else broken. 

 

Here are some pictures attached of the soldering part. 

 

DSC08195.jpg

 

DSC08194.jpg

 

Is there any way I can get them back to life ?

 

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post #2 of 8
2/15/11 at 4:02pm

The plastic tab is not supposed to come off.

 

See if you can find the very small wires coming out from the driver. These are extremely fragile and can be vaporized by too much heat. If yours are still intact, you may be able to salvage the driver and re-attach everything. Proceed with care.

 

I suggest practicing soldering some other stuff first to get the hang of it before doing it for real on the driver.

 

Also, this has helped me a lot:

http://tangentsoft.net/elec/movies/

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post #3 of 8
2/16/11 at 1:52am
Thread Starter 

Thanks for your answer, but actually I'm not that new to soldering ;) 


Before I tried soldering the cables to the driver I tried to use some kind of bridge (Where I could simply screw in the cables and not need to solder it at all). That did not work so I decided to solder it. 

 

So the next step was to look beneath the soldering, Maybe I should not have done that.

 

Is there a way to get the driver out and resolder some cables on it ? 

I don't have anything to loose anyway :) 

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post #4 of 8
2/16/11 at 7:00am

Only if you manage to re-solder the voice coil wires to the solder plate ( and that is possible if you de-soldered them prior to removing the plate from the driver ) . If those wires broke when you "looked beneath the soldering" I don't see a solution ( those wires are very thin - 0.1 mm or less - and they are usually secured to the driver body with resin ) . Probably the best solution is to get a new driver.

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post #5 of 8
2/16/11 at 7:21am
Thread Starter 

I've thrown the whole thing into the bin...

Not really worth the trouble. Seems like I have to live with it. 

 

I think my future sound sets are going into the direction of AKG rather than Grado as I really hate their constructions, especially the cable - Nothing against the sound quality, but the build quality is rather poor compared to phones of this price range. 

 

(My AKG's still did not suffer any broken cable or loose parts for several years ! Those grado's had around 2 years on them - home use) 

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post #6 of 8
2/16/11 at 7:30am

These thin wires are difficult to solder, as you found out.  Make sure wire is wrapped and tinned properly and aim for a very smooth joint. Radio Shack sells some nice thin solder for this purpose.

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post #7 of 8
2/16/11 at 11:55am

Bilavideo's SR60-Mod thread has some info on taking the driver apart completely. It's a long thread but somewhere in there are a couple of posts on how to liberate the driver from its plastic enclosure. There's a YouTube video link in there too. The process involves quite a bit of brute force, I believe.

 

Or maybe you could try scraping off some plastic to uncover what's left of the voice coil wire leads. 

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post #8 of 8
2/16/11 at 2:48pm
Thread Starter 

Hey thanks for that yoga. 

For anyone who might find this thread and search for it: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/508459/sr60-mod/225#post_6952665

 

It took me around half an hour to an hour to get that stuff apart. 

 

I might take a shot tomorrow as I am to tired right now. I think it will be really really hard to get that wires soldered again. 

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