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A couple of years ago (or so ) after buying my first wallbox, I decided to purchase a wb2mp3 and do something with it. As this wallbox has no speakers & was complete internally, I decided to build a box to contain all the necessary components & also to house the speakers.
I built this with items and materials that I had to hand, I built this simple wooden box of a size adequate to house these components, the size of the 25vac transformer and speakers determined an external height of 4 inch, so I ended up with a box that measures approximately 13 x 9 x 4 inches.
I fitted a 5 pin din socket to the side of the box for two reasons firstly as my intention was to sit the wallbox on top of it I thought it would be useful to be able to be able to disconnect the wallbox to make moving it easier as the wallbox is heavy enough on its own. And secondly with a second lead and plug made up I can use the box for test purposes on other Wallboxes.
This box has has been very useful and sounds good but I am no joiner/ carpenter !
As I said it was built from materials I had to hand, it has what arty people would call a industrial / distressed look, I distinctly remember scraping plaster off of the sheet of plywood & removing badly damaged sections before cutting it up, as it had been used as a temporary floor while doing building work.
I recently bought a Seeburg 3w1 wallbox which is quite pretty & small, again I connected it to the wooden box while I was tinkering with it , but now it’s done it just looks wrong sat on that box, so I decided to have a go at building something smaller, but to still have all of the capabilities of the wooden one. As an added challenge to disguise the box so it wasn’t immediately obvious to what it was or what it contained.
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The side view shows the 5 pin din socket, red cancel button, volume adjustment knob and the earphone socket. After the top photo was taken I added 2 more pieces of plywood 1 behind the speakers & another separating them, and two small holes adjacent to each speaker in an attempt to improve sound quality, which I believe it did.
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Rather than building a box from scratch I bought a plastic electrical component / junction box this came with a lid with a rubber seal so I guess it may be for outside use.
The lid is about an inch deep, as the box is 2′ 7/8 & as I had seen some 2′ speakers that I intended to use, I judged that the box was deep enough to contain the required components. Unfortunately to get a box of this depth I had to get one that that was 9′ 1/2 x 7′ 1/2 which didn’t lend itself to the idea I had for disguising the box, so I cut one end off & turned the box through 90° giving me a plastic box of 7 12 x 7 1/8 X 2 7/8 which no back.
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The speakers that are in the wooden box were originally in a couple of Sony mini HiFi speakers and had the bass ports with tubes(didn’t know what they were called or for). I just fitted the tubes as I figured Sony knows more about speakers than me.
As the plastic box , speakers are smaller I made the bass ports smaller there was no science to it just made the holes that size as I thought I had some plastic pipe / tube I could glue in to them.
Cheers Scudie
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Now that I have the box working , I can work on the idea I had to disguise it.
I had never intended for it to look just like a box ! I searched the Internet for ideas but nothing really fitted the bill. I had seen a video where the wallbox is sat on a book shelf and the conversion components hidden inside of a hollowed out book. Which would be great if it was to go on a bookshelf , But I wanted several things from it.
My idea for it was to be portable ie for it to be easily moved from room to room as desired. I wanted to hide away the box, so it wasn’t immediately obvious to what it’s purpose was or what it contained.
I wanted to sit the wallbox on top of it & I wanted it to have the appearance of something that was somehow related to the fifties / jukeboxes / music/ diners.
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Ideally I would have liked to have a lamp between each disc so that the lighting would be uniform this could prove tricky as used pieces of clear Perspex to space out the records.
Might try a strip of led’s on the outside rather than indervidual ones from inside the box where locating them would be much more restricted.
Cheers Scudie
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The clear Perspex thought give me an idea…. Years ago I helped my son make some “angel eyes” for his car headlights. They’re similar to the lighted rings that BMW started using several years ago. He found the method on a car forum somewhere. We took the control rod from some mini blinds (which was made from clear Perspex), cut it to the right length and heated it so we could bend it in a circle. We left enough of a gap to put an LED pointing into each end of the ring. The Perspex transmits light quite well the entire rig would light up. You could probably do something similar with Perspex bands in between your records. That would also eliminate the problem I had with the light from the LEDs being too focused.
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Good evening Steve
Thanks for the information, I took a look at the video, I am hoping to be able to have some time this weekend to have a play with it.
I think that the first step, I will have to clean up the edges of the Perspex sheeting as when it is cut or sanded it takes on a dull white sort of colour. And for the light to show it will have to be polished to make it clear again. Once I am 100% happy with the shape of the Perspex layers I will give them a polish, to see how they respond.
Then I will try some LED lighting to see how it responds, it will have to be a trial & error approach.
Cheers Scudie
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Yes perspex is used to space out the records. I did try it with just records stacked but I didn’t think it looked right, with the spacers in place it’s more obvious that they are records and I wanted to leave gaps at the font because of the speakers. Plus it looks a little like records stacked in a Jukebox, before starting to glue it all together I polished the edge of one segment it didn’t give any advantage regarding light transmitted when compared to a unpolished one,.
Cheers Scudie
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