Yes I
had noticed that bit of your question.
Well, if its...
Orphin wrote:nailed all the way in
...than you wouldn't need to remove it anyway. Not just to remove the grillcloth anyhow!
The nail head would have to be exposed to actually be holding the cloth to the front panel in the first place! And if someone (accidentally) had driven a nail all the way home, well I'd just leave it.
Haven't seen the pics but if, as Billy suggested, the speakers are front loaded, (which they do look to be on that photo you linked above mikel - is that right?), you probably don't need (or want) to remove the whole front panel, only the grill cloth. In fact using nails instead of screws is the best way of making sure the front panel never loosens in use!
The front baffle would almost certainly be attached with more than just 4 nails from the front anyway. I'm fairly sure that if you looked inside from the rear that the baffle would be braced by strips of wood at the sides or corners. And additionally the older PPC4x12 cabs had a center brace strut connecting the front and back panels. Not sure about the series 2 though having never seen inside one.
(You may not like Orange quite as much as Matamp David, but most of us would at least agree that
both companies always knew how to make great speaker cabs which would not only sound great, but also
not fall apart in regular use!)
If we're just being hypothetical though... to remove a nail which had been sunk all the way in you'd either have to hit it from the other end until it wasn't, or try to get at the head from the front with a carpenters nail pincer...
...or pliers, taking off (or hammering down) a (very) little surface wood as needed, just enough to expose the edges of the head and get a grip. Unless a nail is deep that should be easy enough to do nearly invisibly. (If cosmetics mattered that much, which they wouldn't if you were just going to fix a grillcloth over it again.)
Or...
fun solution:
Find a VERY big VERY strong magnet - a big electro-magnet could certainly rip a woodnail clean out of the wood. Though unfortunately it would also move (?
remove) all the other nails in the cab at the same time. And spectacularly knacker your speaker drivers while at it.
(I'm not really recommending this last solution unless you wanted to turn your cab into a redundant pile of ex-functional 'art'!)
Anyway, happily it seems mikel managed to get into his cab!
Yeah, pics of that cab here would be great. They were made right in the very last months of Oranges '70s existence and there really can't be very many of them about at all...
Andy.
... The man just likes pain!