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I love to re-use stuff that would normally get thrown away.
I had an off-cut of an old mountain bike tyre laying on my bench and I had just taken apart an old broken radio and had taken out a little speaker...
...and I put the two together!
MaterialsGet together the bits that you will need...
Hunt in the back of your shed for an old mountain bike tyre, looks great with the aggressive tread pattern, mine was a 26x1.9 inch.
Take a sharp knife and cut out a section of the tyre slicing along beside the metal wire and across the tread giving a length of about 240mm.
The old speaker that I had was a little 0.25watt 8ohm one with a diameter of 50mm which fitted well with the tyre.
To enable the speaker to be securely glued in place with the tyre you will need to make a timber back enclosure which the speaker will be glued to, then giving a nice wide body for the tyre to glue to.
I had a scrap of Redwood in the workshop a bit wider than the speaker.
Mark the speaker onto an end and if you have a wood lathe, turn the width down to the speaker diameter, otherwise some ply and jigsaw can work, gluing the layers together.
Turn down a narrower section and parr off to be gripped in a headstock bowl chuck.
The face can then be turned flat and hollowed out to the shape of the back of the speaker for it to snugly fit.
Sand the outside down so that it is exactly the diameter of the speaker, you don't want to see any of the timber when glued up.
Now for the electronics.
Strip the ends of a couple pieces of wire each about 120mm long, and tin them with solder.
Solder one wire to each of the tabs on the back of the speaker.
Drill a hole in the timber enclosure for and poke the wires through.
Hot glue the speaker to the timber and make sure it is a nice snug fit. I added a little hot glue around the wire hole at the back as well.
Thread the wires through some shrink wrap tubing and use a lighter to gently shrink it down, keeps it all nice and neat and out of the way of the ballast!
Slip a thicker piece of shrink wrap over the wires for the connector.
Solder the wires to the 3.5mm audio socket [sorry called it a jack in the images by mistake]
Push the shrink wrap into place over the socket connectors and heat to shrink.
Apply a little of the rubber glue to one inner midway edge of the tyre section.
Lay the audio socket at the mid point flush with the edge of the tyre.
Clamp this in place and leave to dry.
I wanted the speaker to have a little heft and added some ballast, which also helps to stop the speaker from rolling onto its side.
I decided to make some lead pellets with a small hole punch and a scrap piece of lead flashing.
Some sand or maybe even rice would work as well.
Add these to the tyre.
Apply more of the rubber glue to all of the inner edges and pop the speaker assmbly in place flush with the end of the tyre...
...and tightly clamp all the edges and leave to dry.
...and enjoy!
Keeping with the thyme of the ruggedness of the project, I like the simplicity of the plug in cable. Undoubtedly the body of the speaker could have some additional electronics to enable it to be wireless, though I really love the audio socket just poking out at the back.
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