A pair of AR35BX were local to me and the price was right. They needed some work, with pealing vinyl, degraded driver foam surrounds and failing components in the crossovers. These were a later AR model designed and built in the UK, part of the so-called ‘Digital Monitoring’ series.
They used poly cone woofers of 6, 8, 10 and 12 inches in diameter depending on the model,. They are a sealed acouSTIc suspension. I personally prefer the older AR models with paper cones, particularly the ’80s LS designs that used the wideband tweeter which is a magnifficent driver. Nevertheless the BX ranger sound very good, and will certainly put a lot of modern speakers to shame.
These had pealing walnut vinyl on their cabinets, so it was stripped and replaced with a walnut veneer. The veneer had 8 coats of danish oil and a final wax polish. I left the painted rear panels, and vinyl-covered front panels alone as they are original to the speakers, and in good condition besides some moniro marks on teh backs.
The crossovers were rebuilt with Mundorf eCap capacitors from Hi-Fi Collective.. I used the original PCBs and retained the binding post terminals, along with the internal wire though did fit new spade connectors.
The drivers were rebuilt using new gaskets, foam surrounds and new dust caps, since 1 dust cap was mismatched. The drivers use a vented mesh dust cap, which were ordered from speakerrepairshop.nl along with the gaskets surrounds. The part codes are gask6-4sg, gask8-4, f8arc5, f6car1d and sl-j55.
I made new grilles from 12 mm MDF. The originals were rotting but good enough to use as templates. They are covered with a black acoustically-transparent cloth, glued using a double-sided tape which can be ironed to melt and form a strong bond. I’m experimenting with alternative methods for covering grilles in hopes of finding a glue that can bond the cloth with minimal mess, without steaing the back edge and without mechancial fasteners
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