i was wandering through the giant flea market near where i live when i found a bunch of headless, armless, legless, backless mannequins. they looked like they were waiting to have something made of them, so i grabbed as many as i had cash for at the moment. I ended up with five white ones and one black one. the black one was taller than the rest and seemed to have legs down to the mid thigh, so i thought i would use it for something special.

at first i was thinking about making some kind of lighting with them. the white ones are a thin translucent vinyl type material that would easily work as a lamp shade of some type, maybe a sconce or something, but as soon as i hung them up on the wall i knew what i wanted to do.

i wanted to turn them into a cd player using an older alpine car stereo i just pulled out of my dash and some speakers i’ve been carrying around with me for the better part of the last 20 years. i just replaced the stereo in my car with one of those crazy sony xplod bluetooth handsfree iphone compatible ones that plays all the mp3 files directly off of my phone or a jump drive, so i wasn’t really using the alpine for anything. not using an alpine is a damned shame, so this is what i did with it.

i used some of that black flexible conduit to connect the three bodies together. it looks a lot better than the just the speaker wire hanging out by itself.

here you can see where the conduit goes into the base of the arm. i may continue to mod this so that the tubes are more borg-like, but at the moment its got a real clockwork orange milk bar thing going on. i like that.

i used lexan and hot glue to put together the framework that holds in the stereo and the power supply i’m using with it. at this point i hadn’t painted the lexan peices yet, so they are still clear. i used a dremel to shape the lexan to the inside shape of the body. this allowed me to run a nice bead of high temp hot glue all the way around the braces. i didn’t want to ruin the outside of this with bolts.

the power supply is just an old 200 watt atx power supply from an old and busted hewlett packard pavillion. hp’s are suck ass boxes, but the power supplies and case fans are always useful for other 12 volt things like led lighting or… well.. this.

i never sealed up the cabinets. the back is still open, but what i did was run a line of thick foam weather stripping around the edges of the back. when it hangs on the wall, it more or less creates an acoustic cavity and doesn’t vibrate in the least. in fact, the sound is clear and punchy. the speakers are a pair of pyramid 3 way 3×9 ‘s. they fit so perfectly in the bottom of these bodies that using something else just wouldn’t make any sense.

i’m probably going to continue to mod this project here and there. the center peice with the stereo head in it hangs a good 4 inches away from the wall at the moment. i have already found something i can mold it in closer to the wall with. i’m also going to wire some lights into the speaker bodies and have them on a seperate switch.

all of this, of course, is hanging in the bedroom.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.