Clearwater Speaker Repair
This is an overview of a repair I performed on my Clearwater speakers. This will apply to both the Bose replacement versions and the non-Bose replacement versions as physically they share the same outer components.
I love my Clearwater speakers in my car. The only issue is, ever since I got the car every now and then the speakers would rattle when playing a song a bit louder than normal. Keep in mind that these speakers were purchased and installed over 10 years ago, so I'm sure they have been put to use over the years. I took the door card off to inspect where exactly the rattle was coming from. I figured the rattle was from a loose screw holding in the speaker or something on the inside of the door panel touching the speaker. Turns out the speaker was separating from itself in multiple locations. The first area was the inner diaphragm, also known as the spider, which was completely separated from the frame. The cone had started to partially separate from the foam surround on top as well.
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I looked into speaker replacements that work with the OEM Bose system, and honestly, the Clearwater speakers seem to be some of the only plug-and-play speakers that integrate well with the Bose sound system. I know lots of people remove the Bose system and say it is inferior compared to modern solutions but honestly I have no complaints about the sound quality of the Bose system or the Clearwater speakers. I also plan to put a stock head unit back into my car so it only makes sense to stick with Bose system compatible components.
Now normally I would just replace the speakers with new ones from Clearwater but after seeing the price tag ($300) it made me think twice about it. I decided to try my hand at repairing the speakers since they still technically worked. I reached out to a friend that works in the car audio industry and asked his opinion on what to use to adhere the speaker parts to their respective locations again. With a little bit of research and his advice, I decided to use some adhesive by a company called Simply Speakers called “Speaker Repair Adhesive”. It seemed pretty straightforward to me and for less than $10 I figured it was worth trying out. I also bought a blunt end syringe to better help me apply the adhesive in a more exact way since the areas I was working with were so small.
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One of the challenges I was first met with was keeping the spider off the frame while I laid down the new adhesive. The spider has tension pushing it downwards towards the frame the way it is designed and if I tried lifting it with my fingers I could only hold one side of it up at a time. I didn’t want to accidentally lift the spider after part of it had already touched the new adhesive. I ended up using four pennies to lift the spider completely off the area of the frame that it lays on. That gave me enough of a gap to be able to reach the syringe into the tight area and apply a nice bead of adhesive.
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Once that was done, I moved onto applying the adhesive around the outer edge of the cone to adhere it back to the foam surround. I ended up applying the adhesive all the way around even though it was attached in some areas. The tricky part about this area is that the cone wants to push away from the foam surround and that is not conducive to applying new adhesive. My solution to this was to take a round tupperware container I had, place it upside down without the lid onto the speaker cone, and set a few coasters on top of it to weigh it down just enough to allow the adhesive to set in place properly.
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I allowed everything to cure for 12 hours and then I reinstalled the speakers into the car. It's been almost a month since the repair and I have not had any rattling coming from the speakers. I can thoroughly enjoy blasting the music in my Miata top-down again. :)
