Like I said though, the bottom half was far worse off than the top half, and it now lives on as an item that sees daily use. I imagine a few people are “reeeeeee”-ing right now, from hearing I cut into that beautiful case. Not really sure what to do with it, so I just haven’t touched it. I don’t mind it, but it’s obviously more worn than the upper section and it’d be nice to do something to improve it, without outright wrecking the “lovingly worn” look either. I’ve occasionally wondered how to improve the bottom most section. I had the case for about 5 years, before actually deciding to do anything with it. I cut the removed portions down to the same length as the remaining portion, and filled in those gaps. Cutting it down both gave me an enclosure more suited to my size requirements, as well as allowed me to reuse parts of the speaker grill posts that were not as damaged, to fill in for the missing ones. We’re talking massive strips of the veneer simply gone, heavily gouged speaker grill wood, entirely missing posts from the grill. The remaining section is about 10 inches (25 cm) tall. About one foot (30 cm) was removed, or about the same height as a 33-1/3 RPM vinyl record sleeve. The speaker section (where the damage was) is just under half it’s original height. Some of the wood was in pretty bad shape, and it was far too tall for my needs anyway, so I carefully measured and cut those damaged parts out and reassembled the case into a much shorter version. Honestly though, other than that, it’s not really been touched up any further. I kept a number of pieces of veneer that had come loose and reattached them. I did use a little stain to touch up some spots where the veneer was chipped and gone. Posted in classic hacks, home entertainment hacks, LED Hacks Tagged Amazon Echo, Art Deco, bluetooth speaker, echo dot, retro Post navigationĬall me a little weird, but I kinda like the “well worn” look. But it’s certainly the one we’d most like to see sitting on our shelf. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an old piece of audio equipment get a high-tech transfusion, and isn’t even the first time we’ve seen the Dot used to do it. Judging by the final product, it’s no surprise has a fair bit of experience dragging audio equipment kicking and screaming into the modern era. You can almost imagine a couple of vacuum tubes glowing away inside there. With the RGB LED strips installed inside, the light is diffused through the cloth panels and creates a pleasing subtle effect. What was presumably the volume knob was pulled out of the bottom and turned out to be a perfect place to run the Dot’s USB cable out of.Ī lesser man would have called this project completed, but knows that no hack is truly complete without the addition of multicolored blinking LEDs. then picked up some absolutely gorgeous speaker cloth on eBay and hot glued it to the inside of the panels. With a 3D printed cradle he found on Thingiverse and a liberal application of epoxy, the Dot could get snapped into the speaker like it was always meant to be there. In a stroke of luck, the opening where the driver used to go was nearly the perfect size to nestle in the Echo Dot. To start the process, popped the panels off and ripped out what was left of the speaker’s paper cone and coil. The fact that the original device was a speaker and not a full radio made the conversion much easier, and will have everyone trolling yard sales for months trying to find a donor speaker to build their own. So when came into possession of a wickedly retro art deco speaker, it’s no surprise he saw it as a perfect opportunity to bring some of that old school style into the 21st century by rebuilding it with an Amazon Echo Dot at its core. Our modern hardware can rarely hold a candle to the kind of gear you used to be able to buy out of the “ Sears, Roebuck and Company” catalog. Sure, the vehicles and gadgets we have now are so advanced that they may as well be classified as science-fiction when compared to their predecessors, but what about that style. The phrase “They don’t make them like they used to” is perhaps best exemplified by two types of products: cars and consumer electronics.
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