My first recone- SA-15 D2

Here are some pics of my first recone, which I finished tonight. This is an SA-15 D2 cone to replace the blown D4. Even though this was pretty easy, I am glad to have had this recone to do so that I feel much more confident reconing my 4 Nightshades in the next week or two.
Turns out this is way easier than I had originally thought. A little work and planning involved but if you prepare everything you will need it goes really smooth. Took me about 2 hours start to finish which may be a little much but I attribute that to learning curve and not wanting to screw up and waste a good cone. I imagine that when you get used to doing it, you can do this in about 45 min or less depending on how hard it is to clean the old cone off.
All you pros that have done this many times, please let me know if you got some good tips and tricks, like I said this is my first time.

This is where I started tonight. I had already removed the old cone and alot of the glue from the top ring of the basket. I now needed to tape off the gap and clean/prepare the surface for the new cone.


Here you can see that I have cleaned the surface(orbital sander was awesome here), removed the tape, and I am now ready to fit my new cone.


I then dropped in my new cone and used plain copy paper to get a snug and centered fit.


I popped the cone up on the paper so that I could lay down a good bead of CA glue on the spider landing. I gave the spider a nice coat of activator and clamped it down being sure to match up the terminal leads on the spider as well as the screw holes on the surround.


After the spider was good I moved on to gluing down the surround. I did this one section at a time, just the space between screw holes, pulling up the surround just enough to lay a good bead of CA glue and spray activator before clamping it down. I would wait a couple minutes and move to the next section til all were done.


Here is a pic from the top view of the finished product. On the dust cap, I just centered it as good as possible, trying to measure on 4 sides, then held it down and traced with a pencil to give me a good guide for my CA bead. I used a back wrapped piece of duct tape to set the cap onto my bead and then a roll of duct tape and a paint can to weigh it down for a couple minutes to dry.


This is the last pic, just showing the finished spider landing and the terminal leads that I pinched and soldered. That's it, easy work. I'm excited to get my other cones in the mail so I can do some more.

Nice to see someone doing there own recone in the NW. I just don't like grinding off the old spider and ca glue.

Zooook wrote:Nice to see someone doing there own recone in the NW. I just don't like grinding off the old spider and ca glue.

Yeah, its much easier than I thought. The cleaning was easy with my orbital sander. I would not wanna do it without power tools.

Zack but ur so good at it and do a very very good hon

Very nice job man.. Now let's hope sundown gets there shit figured out and those NS recones too you soon, I can't wait to hear this bad boy all finished. If I remember right you already have one of the NS recones? When you doing that one

stephen_og wrote:Very nice job man.. Now let's hope sundown gets there shit figured out and those NS recones too you soon, I can't wait to hear this bad boy all finished. If I remember right you already have one of the NS recones? When you doing that one

Yeah, my glue should be in from Fi this week so I can do the one I have. My deal on CACO went another direction so I went ahead and ordered 3 more cone kits on Friday. Jacob said they come in this week and he will ship them out this week. I'm guessing 2 weeks or so and I will have all of them coned and be installing the 3 in my 4th order.

That's shitty man that the deal fell through, I'm guessing you got refunded? So I'm guessing you have a total of 4 NS but using only 3 for now?

stephen_og wrote:That's shitty man that the deal fell through, I'm guessing you got refunded? So I'm guessing you have a total of 4 NS but using only 3 for now?

Hoping to get a little money back from the deal yeah. Im just glad to know that the cones are actually on the way now, no more wondering. That's right, will have 4 complete, using 3 for now.