DKinYORKpa

yeah, some of those old cheapo speakers were made with great looking cabinets

Looks like a tiger maple version of the molding on a 3 / 3a.

I have an old Craftsmen FM tuner......I assume it's the same company......the history on the eBay listing talks about their tube amp, as well

Ha, ha, ha, to paraphrase Tina Turner, "what does need have to do with it!" Sounds like the 4x's should go in the workshop ...

LOL......Here's the link to my Fisher re-build:     http://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/french-provincial-console-good-bye.732298/

The speaker on the right in the first pic is my Advent........When the foam surrounds went bad 30 years ago, I gave them to my friend that worked at Clair Audio in Lititz, PA. He was in the speaker department building cabinets for concert speakers. "Yeah, we can fix them easy." A month later I pick them up with new grille cloths and replaced woofers; EV I recall. It was "easier" than refoaming! No charge to me as a friend. The grille cloth was new, I know now, because the EV speakers hit the old cloth and frame!...LOL......I discovered all this when I refoamed those woofers. So they aren't Advents anymore. My refoaming (first attempt) was successful and they do sound good. The Jensen speakers from the console also sound good when loud. I have a stash of 50 year old varnished walnut plywood that I used to make them.

Nice ...

As I said before, make sure there is not a cabinet leak somewhere else.  You do not want an absolutely air-tight cabinet, but you do need an "acoustical" seal, thus the slow return of the woofer when depressed, or put another way, the woofer should feel like it is being moved through a viscous fluid.  The cone should not bounce back immediately when depressed.  The dust cap is probably not critical, since the space between the voice coil and the pole piece is very small and won't let much air pass through, but there are holes in the voice-coil former ("bobbin") that do allow air to pass through.  

You could put the sealer on the dust cap since it is cloth, and see what that does.  When you push in the woofer, see if there is any air movement at the dust cap.  There is the risk of over-damping the woofer, but this probably isn't the case here.  Give it a try, but put a light coat on the dust cap.

--Tom Tyson 

I got impatient for a reply so I posted on the forum. As I said there, air is definitely passing thru that dust cap.