In 1992 I built a pair of Focal Onyx loudspeakers. They cost an arm and a leg back then, but they were a lot fun to build and sounded great.
They have worked just fine over the last 33(!) years, but they have developed some technical and cosmetic issues of course.
So it's high time to refurbish them properly.

I plan to fix the woofer and tweeter surrounds, replace the Pritex foam, speaker cloth and internal wiring, repaint the cabinets and add some new feet.

Gravity and time haven't been kind to the Pritex foam - some of it has just turned to dust and the rest is falling down.

Some info on the units can be found here.

The foam rings have seen better days and are coming loose.
I got some replacement woofer surrounds from repairyourspeakers.com.
The instructions can be found here. I found this video helpful as well.

The sorry state of the foam.

The front was glued on pretty well. A bit too well to my liking... Prying it off made me quite nervous because it took a lot of force; you can see some the plastic was so stuck to the magnet that some pieces broke off the front. I could just image the front breaking into pieces, which would have been a very sad moment... But that didn't happen thankfully.

I ended up using IPA to loosen the glue a bit, and using a wood chisel to pry off the magnet from the front. I know, chisels should not be used like that, but it worked like a charm. It's wider than a screwdriver (which is used in the videos) so it spreads the load a lot better, reducing the chance of cracking the front.

Halfway cleaning the cones. Just IPA, cotton tips and patience.

I used some tape to mark the positive wires. Not ideal, but a sharpie didn't mark it very well, and I didn't want to put anything sticky on it like nail polish.

Foam and wiring all installed and ready for final assembly.

I scraped off most of the glue and plastic from the magents, thinking that leaving it there would prevent a good fit when putting everything back together.

As a result, I needed to put some tape on the magnet as a spacer, to give the cone enough room to move....

I'm glad it's done, this was quite nerve-racking :-) All the parts are small and fragile, it's far too easy to ruin the while thing with one little silly mistake. But that didn't happen thankfully.

I used the alignment method shown in the second video, using a 1000 Hz tone to find the sweet spot. I have no idea how I could have done this by just listening for scratching noises when moving the cone by hand. Moving the cone even a tiny tiny fraction changes the sound, so no way I would have gotten that done properly without the test tone.

Some info on the units can be found here.

These units are "only" 18 years old, because the original Seas H204s broke when my Marantx PM-80 amp blew itself up.
I replaced those with some H304s I found on Ebay in Australia. Believe it or not, that was the only place I could find any, so I bought 4 just in case. So now I have 2 spare units in storage...
The H304s are fine, no work needed on those.

Some info on the units can be found here.

These are perfectly fine. The surrounds still look and feel like new.
Seems a bit strange that the surrounds of the bigger woofers (same brand and age) are so much worse.

Some info on the units can be found here.

I got some replacement surrounds from repairyourspeakers.com.
The instructions can be found here.
Repairing the woofers was not as hard as I had feared, the instructions were clear and simple.

The surrounds have turned into something resembling brittle plastic; some parts have fallen off and the rest breaks easily.

Getting the cardboard layer off was tricky, it was really glued on well. Some sticker remover and careful scraping took care of that.

I didn't risk trying to get the final bit off of the cones; the risk of damage was too great. So I just glued the new surround on top of that.

Before and after adding the new surround.

MDF is strong stuff, but basically it's just very thick paper. So this happened while trying to remove one of the mounting nuts from the bottom...

The crossover filters look perfectly fine. One of the inductors needed some hot glue to keep it in place, but that's it.

I think I will try to mount these on the side this time instead of the back, if that fits, to simplify the wiring.