James, the job is now completed and the speakers replaced whence they came.
Although the glue was dry long before I'd expected it to be, I wasn't going to wreck my work by cranking the beast before at least eight hours had passed so I fitted some fresh D cells into the battery tubes (the output is reduced when running from battery..) and gently brought the volume slider to the first notch on its scale with some gentle MOR tunes playing from a GD King & PV Airey jazz/blues tape that's at least as old as the PC-5 herself.
Wooooaaaahhh! This thing is so sweet with those factory drive units back where they belong. No need for co-axial tweeters and bright blue, metallic cones here, this is a very, very tuneful old thing that - in typical JVC fashion - plays even old, type 1 prerecorded tapes with a quality that makes these tapes sound as though they were new. I did risk pushing the loudness button once, after I'd reduced the bass level on the pot and turned down the volume, and although these speakers should be treated gently for a while, the potential is obvious and the sound precise, clean and very, very strong even at that low setting.
I can't wait to give her a bit more throttle tomorrow when the JVC and I will be heading south to give a certain other Northern forum member a taste of why he needs to add at least one multi-section box to his fleet!
Big thanks are due to the guys at Queensland Speaker Repairs, thanks to whose clearly marked diagrams on their site -
to show every dimension needed when selecting the surrounds for the job - this classic piece of kit is singing as sweetly as she would have done when new. The parcel took only six days to get here from Aus, they're great people to deal with and as I said already; their price was lower than any price for a similar product from within the UK and none of the UK suppliers listed a kit that came with the correct glue (loads of the stuff, I have one unused tube left and there's still a little in the one tube I opened), some big cotton buds to help with getting the glue in under the cone in the awkward bits where the leads run behind it and into the coil, a comprehensive set of instructions how to go about the repair and plenty of packing to make sure that my bits arrived safely.
As for whitening the cones, that'll have to wait. I can see this box being on constant cassette duty for the foreseeable future!
Both cones finished:
The way that the surrounds fit to the underside of these cones:
And the speakers back where they belong, I'll whiten them some day, honestly, I will: