Banpei's two door panda Trueno from Japan

[banpei]

I have made a decision on the Celica Supra wheels: I'll try the orbital sander on the spokes first and see how much effort it takes to remove the paint and whether there is another layer below this one. I can always have them stripped if it's too much effort with the sander.

About the TS-X11 speakers: today, I took the non-functioning speaker apart. All of a sudden, it burst back into life, and the tweeter worked fine. However, the midrange speaker did not. I tried looking at what's wrong with the midrange speaker, and it looks like one of the thin wires on the speaker doesn't make contact with the driver. One of them is fine, but the other isn't. All three speakers are complete units that can be swapped.

Normally, I would be able to fix this by soldering a new wire. However, the wires are inserted into the dust cap and then probably soldered right behind the dust cap to the cone. To make it a bit clearer, this is what the complete unit of the midrange speaker looks like:

As the wire goes through the plastic frame, removing the frame to get to the dust cap already requires desoldering the wires. Then, removing the dust cap might also damage the good wire underneath. This is not a repair I'll be looking forward to.

Replacing it with a (new) speaker with the same specifications will also be an issue: there are no markings on these speakers, so the specifications are not known. I could replace them with some random speakers that would roughly fit the size, watts and resistance of the overall specifications. However, then I would have to replace both sides, and it could change the way they sound drastically. It would probably ruin the looks of the speakers behind the grille as well.

I found a replacement module for sale on Auctions Yahoo that has been tested. So I bit the bullet and ordered the part. Hopefully, it will arrive in one piece.