Turn broken speakers into a snappy media cabinet

Step 2 Disassembly (cont)

All speakers have enormous magnets stuck to the back of them that would absolutely wreak havoc on any DVDs, cds, or video games that you put in your cabinet, so those have gotta go (in the first picture, the magnets are the two black rings at the top of the speaker cone, though most speakers only have 1 magnet on them).

Fortunately, these are usually only held on by some small metal pins and a lot of glue (as you can see in the second photo), so they're pretty easy to get off. Just take a crowbar or a chisel and hammer it a ways down into the seam between the speaker cone and the magnets, then pull it out and repeat that action around the full circle of the magnet until it eventually pops off (once you get the hang of it each one should only take you 30 seconds or so, unless the speakers are really tough).

Once you've removed the magnets from all of your speakers, wallow in the delicious scent of self satisfaction before returning to work. It's now time to focus our work on the cabinet.

Comments

[Mattkguns]

Im fairly certain that magnets don't affect plastic media, ie any thing on a cd or dvd. they will however affect vhs's and the like, so if your only building the cabinet for dvds, then you'd be safe leaving the magnets in.

[burzvingion]

yeah, magnets are no threat to optical media. It's just magnetic tape and disk media that you need to be careful with.

[neon41]

what you do need to realise the layer on the top of a cd/dvd is metallic

[Dr. Science]

Magnets DO play havoc on video CRT's.

But really, breaking off the magnets off the voice coils of those old cool woofers is a waste. Those should be re-foamed and mounted in new better designed enclosures for really cool low frequency effects. Don't destroy them.

If you think those magnets are cool, you break into your hard drive and check those puppies out!

[CalcProgrammer1]

The magnets won't harm anything other than maybe hard drives, floppy drives, video tapes, and audio tapes. You can't harm solid state electronics using magnets and optical media doesn't use magnets. However, removing them is a good idea, as they add to the weight and could potentially harm magnetic media.