6mm necklace bead acts as pivot

Countersinks to clear bead

Pushbutton (SPST) switch

½" diameter acrylic disk acts as switch actuator

Wire switches in parallel to pushbuttons on CD player

CD player’s joystick control uses a small bead that leans into four surrounding buttons.

BORN-AGAIN BOOMBOXES

Up from the ghetto blaster, a new life as a functional-art stereo component. By Larry Cotton

 

Don’t you love the fact that off-brand, bait-and- use with headphones or plug into an amplifier. switch consumer electronics can be so cheap? This means dispensing with the speakers and I’ve seen portable CD players for under ten wasting the FM tuner, but it’s still worth starting bucks, including headphones, and you can get a a project like this with a boombox rather than a commodity CD boombox for about $30. Unable cheaper portable CD player, because its modules to resist such great values, I’ve bought a few of are larger, more robust, and more forgiving when these beauties to see what makes them tick, and you rearrange and attach them to strange objects. then reconfigured their aesthetics and turned I’m especially proud of a reconfigured boom-them into attention-getting CD decks. box that I’ve named The White CD, a play on the

The procedure involves taking the boombox Beatles album that’s commonly (and erroneously) apart, and deciding which components will live referred to by a similar title. and which you’ll save for who-knows-what later. The White CD’s innards are interconnected with Then you arrange the keeper components onto relatively long wires, which lent themselves to a some structure, which can range from a beautiful vertical arrangement. The CD spindle could be on piece of hardwood to a coat hanger. Rather than top, the display would be below that, and — ta da! — keeping them as portable stereos, I’ve been turn- a joystick below the display. ing the boxes into deconstructed CD players to A joystick? In previous boombox mods, I kept

Illustration by Damien Scogin