[Sam] built himself a boom box using salvaged parts and a car stereo. The case was cut using a CNC router he had access to at his school. The front panel is cut from a “Construction Ahead” road sign. The size of the case is based roughly on the rotting enclosures from which he pulled the speakers. He’s included connectors for external speakers as well as a USB charging port. The unit is powered by a gel battery and is recharged using an automotive battery charger.
A boom box lets you take the party anywhere. We like this one because of the pop art feel of the finished project.
well i guess putting a car stereo in a custom case is good.
So that’s where the sign went…
Nice, but were do I put in the cassette?
now where did i stash my 8-tracks?
I did one out of iron bracket, added wheels and a fold out handle ’cause it got too heavy. Used it while I was at UPS in Indy. all it had was a ford factory radio, but i gave it to a kid who put in a car cd/radio. wish i had it so i could post picks. my job took me outside so i had to do a little waterproofing. it worked great, had sitting on the back of a tug.
Nifty project. Terrible post title.
Well…. I built one of these when I was a kid, like 20 years ago and it wasn’t a big deal then, so I’m thinking it’s still not a big deal now.
Hell I even mounted one on a motor scooter once after building a converter to step up the voltage so it would run the car stereo and the CB radio I had strapped to the box I made for the luggage rack (not like you can call that a rack but I digress).
While this is a great way to learn about electricity and such, and how to wire up a car stereo, there’s nothing ingenious about this project, and this post is another glaring example of the lackluster crap that you’re willing to post here in an effort to fill pages.
For god sake’s man, leave this kind of kids tinkering for instructables.
Everyone should steal road signs – after all everyone (everyone with a job anyways) just loves higher taxes.
Hope you have a receipt for that road sign.
If not, you’ll probably get to see quite a few of them when you’re on that chain gang picking up litter on the roadsides.
@VonSkippy- The sign wasn’t stolen, it was salvaged from a burn pile. There was a large collection of damaged signs being burnt. I cut the enclosure out of a part of the sign that was still ok.
I Don’t think that cost either of us any tax dollars. (It did help out the environment in some small way though.)
@pookey- Sorry, no receipt- tie me up!
Sweet boombox, job well done on this one.
And as always, haters all be hate’n because they don’t have any bad ass portable thump devices themselves.
i used to make really nice ones like that to sell
I’ve always thought about doing this. It’s nice to see someone follow through so that I don’t have to throw money at it (lol).
I’d definitely like to see more of the true hacks (such as this one), and less full fledged projects, like some of the things I’ve been seeing on here lately.
The tweeters and bass air intakes positions should be inverted as the human ear can find easily the direction a high frequency comes from, but as the frequency drops this becomes harder (to the point we have single channel subwoofers on stereo systems). That way the stereo image would be widened.
Nice build though. Boom boxes are one of the few things I miss from the 80’s.
I hope they calculate right box volume for speaker, because if not they lost a lot of sound quality and power
Using a road sign looks good and gives it an urban feel. I might borrow that idea ;)
For a party last month my friend needed me to set him up a sound system.
We had:
2 car amps
2 normal amps
1 surround sound system (Special amp and 5 speakers)
2 car subwoofers.
Decks
I bought an 800w PSU and managed to hook up the car equipment to the normal equipment resulting in 2 subs and about 8 speakers.
It was bad ass.
did you separate the left and right air cavities inside? you know, so the woofers aren’t fighting each other, even with the breath holes they could still interfere with each other, nice build btw.
I’d really like to know about the power-supply side of this project, and how it works with the battery charging and so on ..
@asdf- thanks for the tip, I hadn’t thought about that at all.
@therian- Yeh, I measured the volume of the speaker enclosures that originally housed the speakers, and made sure to mimic that in the boombox.
@vikki- There are two separators inside that divide up speaker/amp+battery/speaker.
@Jay- The battery system is really simple, the stereo and battery are hooked up in parallel to two screw/bananna plug terminals on the top, which allow a car battery charger to be connected. It can also be hooked up to solar panels, which I did while working in the summer.
And by “salvaged parts” you mean “stolen road signage.”