OK, it took
me a long while to finally get around to refinishing and
re-assembling these, but it was worth the effort.
When I
bought the Calipers, they'd been hand painted in ugly
black, but were otherwise in perfect functional condition.
I first used them in quite a large apartment, but driving
them with a 150w/channel Krell KAV300i, they just didn't
come 'alive'. So I reverted back to my trusty QLN
Signature speakers and the little Apogee Caliper went into
storage. On moving into a larger home I started the
project of disassembling them and repainting the wooden
frames. Of course, being a ham-fisted klutz, I managed to
slightly damage a small section of the bass ribbon on one
speaker. The fact that I was willing to blame this on the
cat, shows what kind of person I really am!
Anyway, I
kinda lost interest in the project and they survived two
more house-moves, with one side remaining detached from
its wooden frame.
Eventually,
after slogging it with a pair of Maggie's for a while, I
decided it might be an idea to either dump the Apogee's or get
them repaired and rebuilt. Plus, my system had evolved nicely
since the little Krell days, and I often found myself
wondering how the Calipers might sound driven by the hefty
SimAudio W10's.
So,
I set about finding an alternative to replacing the damaged
bass ribbons, as first priority. The damage was/is fairly
minimal, in one area towards the bottom of the panel there is
a minor indentation, which I figured wouldn't have any impact
on the sound. However, towards the top of the bass panel one
ribbon had an impression which was deep enough to cause a
small split in the foil. After a great deal of research on the
web, I came up with two possible products that might be used
to effect a repair on the split ribbon. The first was an
aluminum conductive adhesive, but the second option proved to
be...well....pretty much perfect for what I needed. It's a 3M
product and is a very thin (0.02mil) aluminum foil tape, with
a conductive adhesive backing. The width of the tape is almost
exactly the with of the foil, so I cut a small piece around a
half inch wide, and placed it across the split. It is barely noticeable,
has bonded solidly to the ribbon and has thus far performed
flawlessly!
