Heathkit SS-1B - A Rough & Incomplete Project

If you're interested, here is the prelude to this project: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=644350

Because of your help here with the identification of 2 15" woofers I drug home today, I knew by the end of today I'd have a pair of Heathkit SS-1B's. I was told that the enclosures had been left outside for maybe a year. Thankfully, the new owner removed the woofers and the tweeters. Right now, the tweeters are still MIA.

Here is a link that drspiff found for me on the enclosures: http://chadgray.info/projectdetail.cfm?ProjectID=46

So far, my buy-in cost for the 2 woofers (fine shape), the 2 enclosures with crossovers (funkeeee) is a whopping 30 bux. If he can find the tweeters, those will be free as well. Or at least that's what he said at the time. If he wants a few bucks for them, count me in.

I'll let the pictures tell the story, mostly. There's major de-lamination of the plywood on one enclosure, not salvageable. My plan is to buy some fancy cabinet grade maple plywood and replace the tops and both sides. The rest is restorable.

What happens after this is still up in the air. If I get 2 working Jensen tweeters, I'll feel obligated to restore them to original. At that point, they'll be pretty useless without the matching SS-1 speakers. If I do not get working Jensen tweeters, then I can do what I want. I'll have to find a pair of superb 16 ohm tweeters and maybe a midrange. I don't know if the 15" driver will handle mid bass very well.

So much is undecided at this point, no concrete decisions have been made other than to restore the cabinets and use the Jensen woofers.















Biggles

While the danish oil is curing on the old corner enclosure, I figured I'd pull out one of the SS-1B's to see how it went together.

The front grill frame was easy, only held on by a handful of screws from the inside. No glue! This one has been painted, that's easy enough to deal with. I figure I'll remove the cloth and wash it by hand, then staple it back into place.

The rest I'm not so sure about. As you can see, I was able to get one of the rear sides off without much issue. Mostly because it was so rotted and delaminated. But the front sides and the top are pretty darned sturdy, don't move much. I don't see any glue used in the construction, yet. This makes me happy.

I bought a broken, very nice, portable table saw late last year. The one of the owner's employees had dropped it. So, he sold it to be for pennies on the dollar. It took a lot of wangling to get the sucker to cut straight. Turns out the fence moves along with the help of a knob and metal gears. The knob had just skipped a few gears. In about 4 seconds I readjusted the knob versus the gears and it works fine. But it didn't come with a miter gauge, those ain't cheap. I'll need to get that and I think I'd like to have a finish nailer gun too, pop pop, nails in.

I think that if I get the table saw right, a finish nailer in my hand, and a sheet of cabinet grade maple plywood this might just happen.







Biggles

Dang, that was kinda anticlimactic. Once I removed the rear side panels, the rest just popped off without too much effort. There was glue used, kinda sloppily if you ask me. But it was so old, it did nothing to hold anything together. I was really looking for something more adventurous.

As near as I can tell, I now have a template for the Heathkit SS-1B. I can make as many of these as I want now.

Biggles

hard to go wrong with 15" jensens!

rogerfederer said:

hard to go wrong with 15" jensens!

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That's what I'm figurin'. I haven't quite yet figured out what direction I'm going to take with them. Original (if I get the tweeters from the guy), or make them a total package. The crossovers are a bloody mess, even without the weather damage. Whoever built this kit had no finesse. I can't tell where the original design ends and years worth of messing with begins. Wires are cut, here and there. Extra capacitors were simply added to the originals and wound together. Black wires, red wires, who knows. And, it seems like a very complicated crossover for just 2 speakers. I'm wondering if the SS-1's were wired into this box, and frequencies were handled by this one too. I dunno.

I haven't been able to find a schematic yet.

Biggles

Aren't they Altecs? :headscrat

220 EIA code = jensen

i have some knight triaxials that have the same code, which means they are re-badged jensens.

My error. I was thinking of Heathkit HH 1C.

would be fun to find 2 of those!
http://www.heathkit-museum.com/hifi/hvmhh-1-c.shtml

rogerfederer said:

would be fun to find 2 of those!
http://www.heathkit-museum.com/hifi/hvmhh-1-c.shtml

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Uh, yeah. When these were identified the other day, I found those Legato rigs. How the hell do I find those for free, or close. Must contemplate this on the tree of woe.

Biggles

Once saw a pair do big $$$ on the auction place.

Hadn't realized you could get African Mahogany. Yow.

All the same, good luck with the project. Nice pics, thanks for sharing.

I wanted a pair of those for about 25 years, and will be following your project with enthusiasm!

Those speakers were designed as "range extenders" for the much more common SS-1, as you mentioned. which is to sit horizontally on top. Either the SS-1, or its EICO or Jensen cousins would do just fine here, and any of those should be much easier to find than your exceedingly rare SS-1B!

Food for Thought - how about a Klipsch K-400 and an EV T-35 on top rather than messing with cones? Or an Altec 511 and compression driver? These could be a killer bass cabinet for a horn based mid and tweeter!

Also - shame on the jerk who left them outside!

Another option is to scrap the cabinets entirely and build a Jensen imperial folded horn! Those drivers should be ideal for it.

maxhifi said:

I wanted a pair of those for about 25 years, and will be following your project with enthusiasm!

Those speakers were designed as "range extenders" for the much more common SS-1, as you mentioned. which is to sit horizontally on top. Either the SS-1, or its EICO or Jensen cousins would do just fine here, and any of those should be much easier to find than your exceedingly rare SS-1B!

Food for Thought - how about a Klipsch K-400 and an EV T-35 on top rather than messing with cones? Or an Altec 511 and compression driver? These could be a killer bass cabinet for a horn based mid and tweeter!

Also - shame on the jerk who left them outside!

Another option is to scrap the cabinets entirely and build a Jensen imperial folded horn! Those drivers should be ideal for it.

Click to expand...

Hey Max!

Thank you very much for stopping by and laying those ideas down, now I won't lose them! I'm going to need all the guidance I can muster.

There are several things that I must consider when stuffing these things with drivers. One of which is that I don't have much money. I'm mostly unemployed at the moment. The other is that my ears have a hard time with horns. This became glaringly obvious when I set up those two Altec Valencias I found by the side of the road. I loved the horns! But my ears didn't, gave me a nasty headache in about a minute or two.

Biggles

Ha! While I was typing up that last post, the guy called me. He said he'd found 2 old tweeters I could have. Unfortunately, they're 2 different ones. The one on the right is a Stephens Trusonic RT-1, and the one on the left looks like the Jensen version that was in my SS-1B's.

He says he and his wife are in the middle of cleaning out the garage, there's more stuff in there he wants to make go away. I'll bet you the other Jensen tweeter is in there, I'll bet you. And if it's not, maybe I can use it as a bartering chip to get other bits I need through Barter Town.

Patience.

Biggles

love this post. i have always wanted a complete pair of these!

I thought I hated horns too, then I got some la scalas, and man I am never going back! (of course, I used to say the same thing about magenplanars... got to stir things up once in a while to keep life interesting!)

On a budget? In this case stage one is to figure out if the Jensens work properly to see if it's worth going to the next step... I would do a frequency sweep with an audio oscillator and power amp, with a low power (say, 1W or less ), and make sure the woofers are good and one of them doesn't have a loose voice coil, or some other show stopper.

I would pretty much expect that this kind of test will turn up some buzzing, but in my experience with old speakers it's usually just dried out glue around the surround, or loose terminals, or some other issue which is possible to correct with a few dabs of glue. Kind of like finding a buzz in your car dash board, touch everything until you find the source of the noise. Much easier to do this before they're in enclosures and you wonder what that random odd distortion is!

Once this is done you want to have some idea of how sensitive they are, to find a matching mid driver. I would expect in the mid 90s, but I could be wrong.

In any case save everything, even (worst case!) if those speakers do turn out to be bad they are not garbage, they can be reconed.

Best of luck with the project

Solidly braced MDF cabs would be a massive improvement over the plywood boomers.

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maxhifi said:

I thought I hated horns too, then I got some la scalas, and man I am never going back! (of course, I used to say the same thing about magenplanars... got to stir things up once in a while to keep life interesting!)

On a budget? In this case stage one is to figure out if the Jensens work properly to see if it's worth going to the next step... I would do a frequency sweep with an audio oscillator and power amp, with a low power (say, 1W or less ), and make sure the woofers are good and one of them doesn't have a loose voice coil, or some other show stopper.

I would pretty much expect that this kind of test will turn up some buzzing, but in my experience with old speakers it's usually just dried out glue around the surround, or loose terminals, or some other issue which is possible to correct with a few dabs of glue. Kind of like finding a buzz in your car dash board, touch everything until you find the source of the noise. Much easier to do this before they're in enclosures and you wonder what that random odd distortion is!

Once this is done you want to have some idea of how sensitive they are, to find a matching mid driver. I would expect in the mid 90s, but I could be wrong.

In any case save everything, even (worst case!) if those speakers do turn out to be bad they are not garbage, they can be reconed.

Best of luck with the project

Click to expand...

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love horns, good horns, not so good horns. I enjoy the sound, the depth. It's a minute or two in, I get a nasty headache that takes me about 3 hours to shake. I'm sure much of it is my small living room, 12 x 14. It's probably compressing all those frequencies directly into my skull at breakneck speeds.

GREAT idea on finding out whether those speakers actually perform as they should. For the moment, I downloaded an "app for that". It was free, so I'm not expecting much. I'll play around with it and see where it takes me.

Biggles

Pio1980 said:

Solidly braced MDF cabs would be a massive improvement over the plywood boomers.

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

Plywood bloomers! Understood and we'll see. This would cause me veneer the enclosures. Not that I'm against that, but the cost would be more than I can handle for the foreseeable future. And if I do end up going this route, I would feel as though I should do the veneering on my Wharfedale W70 project first. Either one would be my first veneering project, hooyah.

Biggles

I'm not a fan of expo horns either, waveguides otoh, quite nice.

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