In my last post I mentioned that I had acquired a pair of Advent Graduate speakers at a community give-away event. Cosmetically, they were in pretty good condition, but the speaker foams were destroyed. I decided that repair was in order, so at the first opportunity I got on the case.
The photo on the right shows that somebody had placed wet glasses or flower pots on the wood of the cabinets, and that left rings in the finish. This is a problem, but to be honest about it, these rings require furniture repair, and that is one of my favorite hobbies.
A little more annoying was the water marks on the sides of the speakers. It looked like the Graduates had been turned on their sides (how odd) and then plant pots had been placed on them. As is typical, the pots leaked or overflowed and the results were bad messes on the cabinets.
The good news, relatively speaking, was that the sides were covered in black textured vinyl. The vinyl has a fine leather-like texture, when meant that the “mud” had embedded itself into the grain and then dried. This was going to be a tricky clean-up job.
My first task was to clean the cabinet wood. By the way, don’t try this yourself unless you know something about wood cleaning. I do not make recommendations, by the way, so I am just telling a story about what I did. I have a new favorite wood cleaner, and you probably have one, too. I used that cleaner to work on the wood in the same way that I clean furniture. Within a short time I had the wood looking much better and ready for some oil.
After a thorough cleaning the visibility of the water rings was radically reduced.
After the wood was cleaned and dried I applied a lemon oil wood conditioner. This is the same stuff that I put on the wood furniture in the house. It adds oil back into the wood that dries out over the course of the year as the weather changes.
I noticed that the bottom wood on one of the speakers was cracked. Almost assuredly this was caused by drying out in the winter, so applying the lemon oil should help to some degree. When I work on the speaker foams I can look inside the cabinet and investigate repairing the crack.
Cleaning the vinyl on the sides of the Advent speaker cabinets was tedious, as I expected, but the worth the effort. My preferred vinyl cleaner is a product for automotive interiors that happens to come from Tacoma, WA. But, in this case I decided to up the game to a degree and used a window cleaner that I happen to know does not damage vinyl.
As you can see in the photo on the right, I used a toothbrush to scrub the mud out of the vinyl grain. After more time than I care to suggest, the vinyl was clean and looked nearly new.
I think that in the next post I will go over the process of replacing the speaker foams. Stay tuned!
