Repair for speaker cabinet

Bondo epoxy.

Live with it..

Piano repair shop.

Have you had work done by piano repair shop?

I am not someone who does such work, but I think it would help to know more about the specifics of the finish of your speaker (e.g., is it painted or stained wood or some kind of resin, is it a gloss finish or semi-gloss or matte), the extent of the damage (pictures might help), and the level of repair you are hoping to achieve (perfect repair or repair that hides obvious damage for someone not doing close inspection).  A perfect repair might not be possible, and if it is, it could be quite expensive.  A furniture shop that does repair can probably do a decent job.  You might contact KEF because they might help you will the right color of the finish material.

Yeah good insight! I have the R3 which have a black lacquer finish. I talked to KEF and they suggested a carpenter but I am in the midst of contacting a cabinet maker company as they seem to be the best option so far.

KEF was helpful in that they gave me the color code for the correct paint to use to finish the project.

thanks for your help! 🙏🏽 I am not sure how to post pics here as it is not very user friendly.  Otherwise I would have posted it along with request for help.

The nature of the repair and who would be best to do the repair depend on the nature of the damage, the material the speaker is made of and the type of finish.  Without a picture it is tough to say but you may want to look for a guitar repair shop if it is just finish damage.  I would expect guitar repair shops to be more common than piano repair.  Fixing a finish defect is probably more like repair of a guitar finish than fixing a cabinet or furniture, unless the speaker is MDF and there is damage to the underlying substrate.  A picture would be really helpful if you can figure it out.

To get some ideas you can go watch a few videos at Stewart McDonald such as

Fixing a small chip in your guitar's finish - StewMac

I purchased this center channel speaker stand on craigslist once for $20 got it home and realized it was too short. Found a metal working guy who happened to have a shed behind his house. I was thinking what $50 maybe $80. When he had finished, which wasn’t that bad of a job he said $220 please. I choked inside. I kept a straight face and paid him. And truth be told if I needed to have work done again I would’ve called him. The moral of this story is Having people work on your stuff can get really expensive. Choose wisely grasshopper. Once again, so sorry to hear about your so unfortunate experience. What a bummer.  For the curious of us, what happened?

So what happened was I work from home and my audio setup is in my office. I was busy in a meeting and my daughters cat came in and decided to try and use the R3 as a perch and must have jumped to hard on it or landed awkward and it went flying. To my shock and horror I heard band and then the cat flying out of the room and speaker laying on floor. They were on stands but not the KEF stands that allow bolting to keep it steady. I went therapy shopping and ended up getting KEF R11’s that are floor standing. I think I found a furniture repair guy to fix the R3 so I may keep them for another room/setup.

Love and let live I guess 😂 

@rayray57  Posting a  picture is quite easy once you get the hang.

1.  Copy your picture to imgpile.com

2.  On imgpile, "copy link address"

3. Click on the picture icon above and paste the address in the URL line.

Presto.  Just like this.

https://www.amazon.com/Loctite-Fun-Tak-Mounting-2-Ounce-1270884/dp/B003LZMHIY/ref=asc_df_B003LZMHIY?mcid=f79145ec52ce30e9ad1539ccce5f26cd&hvocijid=14216963718102647176-B003LZMHIY-&hvexpln=73&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=721245378154&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=14216963718102647176&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9033780&hvtargid=pla-2281435175938&psc=1
use this between the stand and the speaker and life will become copacetic once again

Wondering how a cat could knock it down..unless he was a shape shifting malamute...Doesn't that kef have dedicated stands that it screws onto? (Stand could be weighed  down further/ fill with steel b.bearings or whatever)?

Or did you cheap out with some 20 dollar crap stand from Amazon?

So what happened was I work from home and my audio setup is in my office. I was busy in a meeting and my daughters cat came in and decided to try and use the R3 as a perch and must have jumped to hard on it or landed awkward and it went flying. To my shock and horror I heard band and then the cat flying out of the room and speaker laying on floor. They were on stands but not the KEF stands that allow bolting to keep it steady. I went therapy shopping and ended up getting KEF R11’s that are floor standing. I think I found a furniture repair guy to fix the R3 so I may keep them for another room/setup.

....*ouch*...Thanks for the pics, but that corner....edge, not so much, but....
KEF would be using HDF for the cabs, and crushing a corner...
Has your  repair guy seen the cab or the pics?

...as soon as I saw 'Piano Black Gloss finish' I cringed....
 

@deep_333 ....My orange tabby could kick over a 27 lb. speaker...you should hear him hit the floor...
Personally, I don't use stands..... 

Have an additional cat that lighter and more agile, not to mention the 27 (yup) lb. Hyperdog with an undocked tail.....that gives the felines reasons to scramble.

...estimated at 1.5 ish yr. old......but not 'pure', no....

We like them like that.....flawed, like us..... ;)

I think a good furniture guy could fix that ... certainly make it look less noticeable.  

@deep_333 they weren’t Amazon stands but they weren’t the screw down type as I was living as a geo-bachelor before returning home after retirement from Army Civilian service so it wasn’t a big deal before because I am super careful and no kids or cats around. I was planning to get the KEF stands but the kitty beat me to it. So I went and purchased R11’s. They are floor standing at 80lbs each. I normally shoot her out of office where system is but was in a meeting and she snuck in and did what cats do. 😂 

@blackbag20 thanks I sent pics to a guy yesterday so waiting to see what he says.

the good thing is there is no other damage and they still sound great! 👍🏽 

@asvjerry yes my heart sank when I heard the bang and saw the Siamese kitty flying out the room! It’s my daughter’s cat and she feels horrible about it too. If only it would have went a little farther out it would have hit a pretty dense mat that is under the peloton and maybe did minimal dent or something. But it is what it is! That’s cool about the Tabby. My daughter loves cats and would like to see it.

thanks for all the feedback. It helps and as always gives perspective from others to gain knowledge 👍🏽👍🏽

Maybe I missed this but I would suggest bondo or similar epoxy wood filler, followed by meticulous sanding, then wet sanding, then paint.  I would think an suto body repair shop could do all or part of this for you.  (you were planning on having the whole cabinet repainted and not just "touched up", right? Black gloss if a very unforgiving finish.)

Let us know how it turns out.

@rayray57 ....mine sank for you seeing the pics....High gloss finishes look great until mishaps occur....and seem to always involve an upper corner....

Great that you got the color match for the finish, but I would expect your finisher will want to re-spray the entire cab.  Touch-ups can leave 'halos', even if using an airbrush to apply the paint.  But see what the vendor suggests the plan is.... 

Speaking as one who used to be in commercial signage and graphics, a designer would occasionally ask for 'PMS-5273.5'....the '.5' didn't exist, and generally drove our paint dept. crazy, trying to 'warm' or 'cool' a color by a fraction creating samples.  A teaspoon in a pint?  Too much....  In a quart?  Not enough....😒

Yes, it does come off as similar to regarding how our systems 'sound' after a tweak of Something.... ;)

KEF’s service dept. might as well be bad AI. If anything is outside of their lane, they don’t have a clue! 
If you have an old school piano store in your area, maybe they can fix your R3 or give you a lead on who can.

All the best.

@rayray57 from JayJay53, my advice is a combination of (1) live with it and (2) repair it enough so that you can live with it. 
Tier 1: Get out a black magic marker and hide the raw wood

Tier 2: Get some Plastic Wood or other wood putty on it, and either layer it up to size or oversize it before sanding smooth and either staining or painting to match

Tier 3: Considering the difficulty of matching a piano black finish, consider the putty + sanding repair before painting them a whole new color, like yellow for the patio, or pink for a bedroom, etc. This option will result in a whole new speaker in which the damage is well-hidden. (My grandfather was famous for eventually painting all his old furniture.)

Best of luck any way you choose to go. 
(Any professional repair will likely run you low three figures, in my opinion.)

@rayray57 you didn't go wrong buying the R11. I have some in a Den system.  Perfect for music and Home Theater. 

Have you had work done by piano repair shop?

No, but I have black glossy speakers, similar to Wilson Puppy, and the piano repair shop would be the first place for me to check.  Trying to repair myself damaged surface with black epoxy could get very messy.

@kijanki my thoughts exactly. I used to be good when I was a kid and my hobby was building and painting model cars. Not so much anymore. I switched to detailing  cars and that’s my new hobby.  I will leave it to the professionals 😂 

I suppose some tabbies can get big.

Bit of a jungle where i live.... 2 argumentative husky siblings, 1 lab, 2 bengals, 1 tux, a mutt weirdo, goats, a rescued bull, etc...Surprisingly, none of the cats have hopped on any speaker, except for a heavy center channel speaker on a heavy stand, it ain't going anywhere.

I keep all doors closed when the night time zoomies hit, however...(one could never be too sure when things get a li'l wild).

@deep_333 ....My orange tabby could kick over a 27 lb. speaker...you should hear him hit the floor...
Personally, I don't use stands..... 

Have an additional cat that lighter and more agile, not to mention the 27 (yup) lb. Hyperdog with an undocked tail.....that gives the felines reasons to scramble.

Color matched wax. Damage isn't that bad.

@incorrigable thanks for feedback! I have a furniture repair guy coming Friday. Let’s hope he can make it look good again! I look forward to seeing what they can do.

Best of luck...🤞

Thank you sir! 🙏🏽🙏🏽

Bummer. As they say" "Hindsight is 20Hz-20kHz."

Just a couple of comments on the repair. Wood damage can be compression (wood smashed in from impact -- dent) or gouge (material missing) or combination of the 2 (or more?) factors. We had a vintage speaker presented for repair that had taken a tumble (off a speaker stand). I could see that the the speaker had impacted multiple hard surfaces on the way down.

I remembered an old trick from wood shop where "sweating" the wood was preferrable to sanding out, or filling, dents. Back then, we used old soldering guns placed on top of a moistened cloth to create steam and expand the material. Pretty effective, actually. I decided to try a modern method based on what I had on hand -- paper towels and a heat gun. My expectations were pretty low, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it worse. So, I moisteneduntil a paper towel and placed it on the damaged part of the speaker and blew heat on it. I kept after it, moving the heat gun randomly until he paper towel was dry. A few minutes later I would classify this as a borderline miracle in that the damage was unnoticeable in some areas and greatly improved in others.

This. may not work miracles in your case, but could reduce the severity of the repair from, say Tier 3, to Tier 2?

By the way, a few years back an owner’s cat decided to get "curious" about a Beryllium tweeter in a pair of Focal speakers, and "modified" it with a full length gash through the tweeter diaphragm. The "accommodation price" (our landed cost) of a new tweeter was around $1,000 if I recall correctly.

Good luck.

Thank you for the kind advice and I will pass this to the guy that is coming today. Hope he is able to help it look better. Worse case scenario is I give them to my daughter as a gift and she can have the memory compliments of her cat. 🐈‍⬛ lol.

I took the screens of the R11’s as I thought she might try and sharpen her nails on them but now this also gives me pause.

i just need to keep her out of the room as best I can and keep door closed when away.  It’s a challenge to say the least.

🙏🏽

Any furniture guy will know how to make it look better.  It is the perfect, or near perfect repair that would be costly.  That would require refinishing the entire cabinet, not just the point of damage.  

You can touch it up with high-gloss black paint and a tiny brush (don't use a marker, wrong sheen). It will be better, but not perfect, and very inexpensive.

Otherwise, hire someone to rebuild the damaged corner with epoxy, not wood putty (JB Weld works well for this), sand, and respray at least the 4 visible sides of the cabinet. This will make it look like new, but likely cost a couple hundred.

Anything in between is likely to prove some combination of disappointing and expensive.

Good luck, and let us know how it turns out!