"No expense spared," would seem to be the spirit held by the engineers at Sega when designing this classic game. They added a 12" woofer to provide just that little bit of added bass when passing through tunnels. This is the second Turbo I've owned, and in both cabinets, the woofer surround had disintegrated.
I wanted to preserve the original speaker, so I started researching speaker repair options. Thanks to YouTube, that didn't take long. I quickly located a kit from Simply Speakers. Part number, for those interested, was the FSK-12F-1 (Single).
The kit included a brush, glue, the foam surround, and a nice set of instructions. Here are a few pics of the kit, and the sad state of the 12" woofer:
The process was pretty simple, since the majority of the old foam surround had dissolved entirely. With a nice sharp box cutter, I removed the thick cardboard material around the outer frame. Carefully setting those pieces aside, I then continued to scrape away the remaining glue and bits of old foam. As you can see, the paper cone was in excellent condition.
Once I had it down to a nice clean surface, it was a simple matter of gluing the new foam surround to the cone. After this had dried for several hours, I came back and glued the outer edge of the foam to the frame, then glued the thick pieces of insulating material back to the outer rim. After allowing this to dry overnight, I cleaned up the dust and any crud with a damp cloth.
In the end, the newly repaired speaker looks great, and sounds great. Well it sounds original, great is an overstatement. Let's just say it sounds like it should. I highly recommend this process to anyone, the original speaker is totally worth saving for this little bit of effort.
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