Phone Speaker Amplifier

Several weeks ago I spent some time with Jay Bates in his shop. Aside from lots of goofing off, we did manage to knock out several projects.

Often I use my phone as a music player but hate having to deal with Bluetooth if I only want to listen for a short time. I’ve seen many people create their own version of a speaker amplifier but I wanted it to be simple, yet functional. The original idea was a “pill” shape and use some speaker mesh to give it the appearance of the Beats line but this beautiful piece of hickory was no candidate for paint.

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It wasn’t really necessary but I wanted to see how well a plane would handle this credulously hard hickory, it scoffed at the task.

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This piece was just barely too wide to fit the jointer so I cut it down to a rough size. This left a nice chunk of wood left just screaming to be turned into a mallet.

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Using the USS Enterprise, I joined two surfaces parallel so it would be easier to accomplish squaring the ends.

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I used calipers to measure the maximum radius and drawn a pencil line and then turned the piece down to the pencil line. Using off-center mounting left a nice flat bottom but it did create a ton of vibration.

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This piece of hickory was beautiful and was pretty painless to turn. In all, it was about 15 minutes to turn it from the block down to the final shape.

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Given the odd shape, the majority of the sanding was done while still mounted to the lathe. Finally a use for the 1/4 sheet palm sander; I don’t believe I’ve used one for years.

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Both ends were sliced off to remove the divots from being mounted on the lathe.

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The speaker hole was drilled using 1-1/4″ bit and it stopped approximately 1/4″ from the back.

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The hole for the phone was done with a 1/2″ router bit. As I wasn’t familiar with his router, he cut the slot.

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Success, the holes are meeting!

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Rounding the holes as well as further elongating the opening for the sound cavity was done with chisels, several different files, and a rasp.

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After a bit of thought, it looked a bit plain with just a hole in the middle. I decided to drill holes on each side to accept a turned pen from the same chunk of hickory.

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More sanding to get rid of pencil marks, any sharp edges and to clean up from the holes and slots I drilled.

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Three coats of clear shellac (cut with alcohol) was applied leaving a very beautiful and natural hickory color.

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