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AR3 - repairs performed by AR?


smirsh

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I bought a pair of AR3's at an estate sale this past weekend, my fourth or fifth pair. Original owner was U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with an audio bent. All of the

AR3's I've owned until now have had the corrosion problem with pots, but not these. These sound factory new. Here's the thing - grilles have been removed and replaced. They are the saran grille but the grille frames are the black plastic. Serial number are 53XXX and 60XXX. Drivers appear original.

These tags were on the back of the speakers. Has anyone seen these before? I think that AR may have performed this service in 1982 as the original boxes were present on site, though they had been discarded in the back yard with other deemed "trash" and had been in the rain for about a week, rendering them pretty useless.

Thanks for any replies.

IMG_0569.JPG

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Welcome! So you're the guy that's been hoarding all the 3's that I've been looking for, huh??

There will be others who can more definitivly answer your question, but I'm guessing that if you bought these in the Boston area, there's good reason to suspect that you're correct. 

Or not. 

 

In any event, when you get the chance put up some more pictures of them. Always like to see pictures of 3's when I can. 

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13 hours ago, smirsh said:

I bought a pair of AR3's at an estate sale this past weekend, my fourth or fifth pair. Original owner was U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with an audio bent. All of the

AR3's I've owned until now have had the corrosion problem with pots, but not these. These sound factory new. Here's the thing - grilles have been removed and replaced. They are the saran grille but the grille frames are the black plastic. Serial number are 53XXX and 60XXX. Drivers appear original.

These tags were on the back of the speakers. Has anyone seen these before? I think that AR may have performed this service in 1982 as the original boxes were present on site, though they had been discarded in the back yard with other deemed "trash" and had been in the rain for about a week, rendering them pretty useless.

Thanks for any replies.

IMG_0569.JPG

No, those are not Acoustic Research tags.  Those look like some military tag of some type, probably unrelated to the speakers themselves.  Finding the original shipping cartons is not common, but not unusual either.  Most responsible owners (those who had storage room) did retain the shipping cartons -- as requested by AR with the original instructions -- so that if the speakers needed to be returned for service, these boxes were the safest way to do it.  Finding original cartons with these speakers usually indicated slightly greater care by the owner, and it always adds to the value later on. 

I think that by the 1980s, factory service was not the usual form of field repair, and many speakers were referred to "authorized service stations" for fixes.  In any event, all of the original-type drivers were no longer available by that time anyway.  The serial-number range of these AR-3s would put them in the mid-1960s period for production in Cambridge.  Send some pictures of the drivers for better identification.

All AR-3s had the grill material attached to the molded-plastic grill frames after about the first year of production back in 1959.  The pressboard frames were only used with the earliest version of the AR-3, and are characterized by only one side of the bottom of the frame (woofer end) having the "triangular" section at the point of the AR logo plate.  Plastic frames had the triangular shape on both sides of the bottom of the frame.  Insofar as the frame has to be "flexed" to put into place before gluing, the plastic frame was originally better suited to this purpose and would hold its shape better than the earlier frame.  As time wore on, however, the plastic became a bit more brittle and prone to snap or break when trying to remove the grill.  Great care must be used in removing and replacing the grills on AR-3s, and you can invariably tell when a grill panel has been removed.  The factory, however, glued the frames in place, and the frames did not move or allow stretching of the material.

--Tom Tyson

 

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