OCD is a time-consuming endeavor.

So a friend of mine is leaving the state and he gave me two garbage bags full of speaker wires, chargers, headsets, cables, etc. - they're all tangled and it's going to take hours to unravel them all.

At the bottom of one of the bags were a set of computer speakers that were beat up, dirty and were stuck together with the double-sided sticky tape someone stuck onto them during the Clinton Administration.  You know the kind with the RCA jack connecting the right speaker to the left with no apparent reason for splitting the speaker wire in the first place (see pic below).

They sounded okay except if you jiggled the 2.5 mm jack, it would crackle and cut out until you jiggled it just right.  And man they were unwieldy.  There was no easy way to carry them.

I went to a thrift store and found a similar pair of speakers for $2.95, so I thought I would take apart the ones my friend gave me and possibly resolder a new jack onto the circuit board and put them into a single enclosure so they would be easy to carry.  I didn't think it would take too much time when I started.  See, whenever I start a project like this, I obsess until it's finished.

I took a pair of tin snips and cut the guts out.  Then the wires started breaking and I kicked myself for not taking a picture of the wires so I could resolder them to their correct joints easily.

I took the guts to Target and picked out a cloth-covered hard cardboard utensil box for $2.99.  I cut two holes on the left and the right side of the box using a drill bit with a circular door handle cutting attachment.  I covered the holes with some material I cut from a new pair of black pantyhose - long story - and glued it using a hot glue gun that takes those little glue sticks.

In the picture below you can see the old speaker housings on the left with the sticky tape still attached, the speakers I picked up at the thrift store on the right, and the finished brown box in front of them plugged into my mp3 player.  The floor tiles are about a foot square for size comparison.



I resoldered the speakers to the board and I cut the earbuds off an old broken headset and soldered the wire with the 2.5 mm jack onto the board.  I had to guess as to where the old speaker wires and the old jack connectors were located because they had broken off in handling the guts.  I then screwed in the speakers and the transformers with tiny screws and used tons of glue just to be sure, see below.

When I tried to find a way to secure the circuit board that held the on/off button, the volume control knob, the headset jack and the red LED indicating power to the unit, I couldn't orient it in a way that I could get those bits to stick out unless they stuck way out. I couldn't have that because the circuit board with its exposed soldered joints stuck out too.

The solution was to put the board in at a 45 degree angle.  I had to dig into the box a little to get it so that the lid would close.  You can see in the pic above that the red LED is shining at the top of the box and you can barely make out the headphone jack next to it.   There was no way to make the control knob and on/off button stick out only slightly, so I removed the button and knob.

In order to turn it on and off, or adjust the volume, you have to open the lid. Here's what the inside looks like.  The unit has been rotated 90 degrees toward you and the back lid has been opened. You can see the same red LED in the foreground:



So let's do some math.  I got the old speakers from my friend for free.  I went to a thrift store and just happened to find a similarly-designed pair for $2.95 that work great.  I bought a $2.99 box at Target for the guts of the pair my friend gave me.  The broken headphone jack replaced the crappy 2.5 mm jack.  The pantyhose were from an aborted WDF? birthday gift care package and the wire for the speakers was salvaged from the original unit once I got rid of the RCA connectors.  

This project took like all day. From going to the store to finding my soldering iron and glue gun, buying more glue, and taking apart the thrift store speakers to see if the circuit boards were the same so I could get a clue as to where the wires were originally located - the boards were different, all this took about 12 hours, with a couple of breaks in there.

That's the problem with OCD, it's perfectly normal to expend huge amounts of energy for so little return.  Now I have two sets of speakers when I really only need one.  See, my monitor has built-in speakers.  What a tremendous waste of time.

we need this one hehe or we need to start up a podcast/talkshow

Um, yeah.  I did try them on out of curiosity when I opened the package yesterday, but I was only able to get one leg in up to my thigh.  They're not made for dudes.  So yeah, they were "new" but also surprisingly silky-smooth.

when your house burns down you'll know who to sue.

Soon my love, soon. 

I'm currently unemployed.  I had a job interview last week and I'm going to another this week.