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A really, REALLY beat up K1000 meets a kid with way too much time on his hands

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Some people who browse the 'Bay regularly may have noticed a severely mistreated AKG K1000 up for sale. Absolutely filthy, with only one working driver, no cable, no strain reliefs, no headband pads, and a severely stretched out headband. $199 starting bid, free shipping, put up for a week, still no bidders five days in.

Now I personally have been ogling the K1000 for quite some time now. It may seem odd, but I also greatly enjoy restoration projects. The idea of owning this headphone, especially one that must have been tossed off the side of the empire state building and straight into the nearest open manhole, was absolutely exhilarating. So, I did what any irresponsibly ambitious person would do. I jumped on it like stink on shit. The auction ended at $308... and it became mine.

I am currently still waiting for the headphone to arrive in the mail, so before I can start any teardown/restoration, I'm gonna throw down some thoughts about my plans for it.

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Cosmetics

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PAINT:

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I have several color schemes in mind if I end up being unable to repair the stock drivers. However, before I get into those, I need to figure out how I'm going to paint it. I'd like to do a professional powder-coating job, but unfortunately, I do not have access to a paint booth. I plan on contacting Custom-Cans and Colorware to see if they will help me out, but for now I'm operating under the assumption that they will not. (If anyone else knows someone who could do this for me, please let me know via PM.)

What I'm looking for is an attractive finish. Not necessarily cheap, but something that I can do myself without any training or experience. Yeah, fat chance, I know. One thing is certain: no matter what color scheme I end up going with, it's going to be a matte finish. After a bit of looking around, I found a few options:

• Plasti Dip: Yeah no, glad I looked around about this stuff more before buying it. Maybe usable for making new strain reliefs, but I doubt it.
• Nextel: The spray-on variant of this product has been discontinued for a while, and I can't figure out where to look to order it. Yay for me.
• Krylon: Self-explanatory. Probably won't look nice enough, but conversely probably the only one I can do myself.

So yeah, if anyone knows someone with a paint booth that would be willing to do a custom job, let me know. >___>

As for the color patterns themselves, I'm working on a basic model of the K1k I can use to make test renders and play with colors. Yeah fuck that, it'll take too long to make an accurate model. Might do it later. For now, here's some photoshop bullshit instead. Vote in the poll (no polls?! what kind of 90s BBC forum IS this?!?!) or post comments about the different colors. I personally seem to leaning more towards 4 and 5. Idk, I think I'm gonna do the model instead, it's a lot easier to do colors with that.

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CABLE:

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Before I choose the final cable, I ordered a cheap Monoprice 1/4" to RCA cable to cut up and wire to the headphone for testing. If I can fix the stock drivers, I might have to stick with this cable for the final product unless I make my own with high-spec wires. Lots of power will be running through this headphone.

I'm considering a Zy HD800 cable as well as HD800 sockets on the headphone side, which you can order from chinese manufacturers (but for some reason no one has any HD600 sockets... fucking dumb. If anyone knows what that connector is called, let me know; it is NOT a Sennheiser proprietary design).

More on the cable later.

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Sound

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I have three plans on what to do with this headphone sound-wise.

PLAN A:

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My first course of action is obviously going to be to try and repair the broken driver. If I can get the driver working, I just got myself the best deal on a K1000 anyone will ever see, ever again. Yay. Except I know the likelihood that the driver isn't completely fucking shot is quite low. So, after I'm done exercising my tolerance for futility, I'll be moving on to...

PLAN B:

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I have always wanted to try a K1000-style DIY headphone. But, an ACTUAL DIY K1000 was something I never thought I'd be able to do. Again, yay. I have several pairs of working drivers on hand from various headphones I've gathered over the years, just begging for another chance to perform. They are as follows:

• Peerless MB 55mm Orthodynamics, 120 ohm (of the breed seen in the B&O U70 and Magnat RT-10)
• Fostex 55mm dynamics, 32 ohm (used in several OEMphones, mostly Audatron gear)
• Pioneer Monitor 10-II drivers, 50mm, 20 ohm

The first two have already proven themselves to be quite nice sounding in a fully-open implementation, such as the one the K1000 would provide (The Magnat RT-10 is particularly exquisite sounding). The Pioneer drivers on the other hand have been needing a shell for a while, and are the reason I was looking for a donor shell in the first place, but I'm not certain how they will sound in the K1000. The driver's distortion is extremely low and the bass lacks any kind of "warmth", which might lead to a VERY thin, unpleasant sound.

I plan on trying all three of these drivers at least once before doing any major repainting or alterations to the K1000 enclosure. However, there is one more course of action I could try...

!!-PLAN C-!!

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This is what I would call the "Super K1000" if it works.

You can order Sennheiser HD800 drivers from senn for ~$500 a pair.

Really, do I even need to say anything else?

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I did the research and compiled the prices for the different transplant options. These are just my notes so I'm gonna spoiler them.


Cheers, will update later.