KEF 103/4 Disassembly Photo Guide

[SirByrd]

A few months ago a customer brought me these speakers to work on:

But the catch is, the two woofers that need repair are inside the cabinet! How do you get to them?
Before you start make sure you have the right tools, you'll need quite a few for this project.
You need a 5/12" hollow-shafted socket driver, a #2 philips screwdriver, a pair of needle nose pliers, a normal pair of pliers, a of wire cutters, a wire stripper, a flat tool to pry, a hex driver or allen wrench, a soldering iron, solder, desolder wick.
Optional: plastic case to hold pieces

First, you must invert the speaker:

Remove the screws you find here, carefully pry the cover off, I used a flathead screwdriver.

You'll find fluff, remove this to reveal your first victim.

Voila!

Use your socket driver here to remove the four nuts:

You will also need to remove that center bolt. I didn't have a socket driver large enough for it so I carefully used needle nose pliers, this is a very long bolt so it takes some time.
It is not necessary but highly recommended to have some sort of container for all of the parts you remove.

For some reason KEF wanted to make these extra hard, so the wires are soldered in place, I might replace these with quick connect terminals, but maybe not.
Clip the wires, making sure to leave some of the insulation for when you reconnect the wires. You could also desolder the wires, and write down which wires go where.

This is what it should look like:

Here is your first driver:

[SirByrd]

Now stand the speaker upright and take a look at the crossover plate.
This is held in with a few hex head screws. You'll need an allen wrench for these, or a hex-driver.

You'll be presented by a bunch of wires, and a hole with fluff in it, remove the fluff to reveal the second driver. Remove the quick connect wires, marking their placement on the board, and clip or desolder the two wires that are not quick connects (WHY???)

And here you are:

Use your socket driver to remove the nuts. My driver was too tall and ran into the screw in the front left corner (looking in) so I had to remove one of the nuts with pliers.
Next you will need to remove the center bolt on the magnet. This will not work unless you reach through the port and grab the aluminum piece connecting the two drivers. I used pliers here.

There will be two wires paralleled off of the top driver's terminals that will need to be desoldered or snipped, I cut them.
Here is your bottom woofer!

I already had one of the other woofers refoamed

[infinia]

wow thanks for showing this, a lot of involved labor to fix up an unusual bandpass bass design. How old were the rotten surrounds and was it hard getting replacements?

[SirByrd]

The rotten surrounds were original and it shouldn't be tricky to get replacements, only if you are cheap is it tricky (I am cheap) but you can find them and the donuts easily.
In this case two of the woofers had to be reconed entirely because the PO had played them too long with no surround and the coils had been destroyed.