½" diameter acrylic disk acts as switch actuator

6mm necklace bead acts as pivot

Countersinks to clear bead

Pushbutton (SPST) switch

Wire switches in parallel to pushbuttons on CD player

CD player’s joystick control uses a small bead that leans into four surrounding buttons.

BORN-AGAIN BOOMBOXES

Up from the ghetto blaster, a new life as a functional-art stereo component. By Larry Cotton

Don’t you love the fact that off-brand, bait-and-switch consumer electronics can be so cheap? I’ve seen portable CD players for under ten bucks, including headphones, and you can get a commodity CD boombox for about $30. Unable to resist such great values, I’ve bought a few of these beauties to see what makes them tick, and then reconfigured their aesthetics and turned them into attention-getting CD decks.

The procedure involves taking the boombox apart, and deciding which components will live and which you’ll save for who-knows-what later. Then you arrange the keeper components onto some structure, which can range from a beautiful piece of hardwood to a coat hanger. Rather than keeping them as portable stereos, I’ve been turning the boxes into deconstructed CD players to

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use with headphones or plug into an amplifier.

This means dispensing with the speakers and wasting the FM tuner, but it’s still worth starting a project like this with a boombox rather than a cheaper portable CD player, because its modules are larger, more robust, and more forgiving when you rearrange and attach them to strange objects.

I’m especially proud of a reconfigured boombox that I’ve named The White CD, a play on the Beatles album that’s commonly (and erroneously) referred to by a similar title.

The White CD’s innards are interconnected with relatively long wires, which lent themselves to a vertical arrangement. The CD spindle could be on top, the display would be below that, and — ta da! — a joystick below the display.

A joystick? In previous boombox mods, I kept