Radiobox progress

I haven’t been blogging lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. I’m working on adding a radiobox onto ARP Synesthesia, and also starting to plan out my next builds — swingbikes! I’m pressed for time right now, but here are a few photos.

I managed to mount the subwoofer to the front fork using U-bolts and by cutting a flat mount out of steel stock. This taught me the value of a sharp hacksaw blade, and its effectiveness over an angle grinder. The angle grinder is an excellent brute force weapon, but the hacksaw blade excels at fine work. Anyhow, I’m stuffing the sub enclosure with polyfill in order to deaden the sound — lots and lots of polyfill:

The inside of the subwoofer enclosure was liberally sprayed with spray adhesive — nasty stuff — and I jammed the polyfill inside the enclosure:

Once the polyfill was loaded, the next challenge was installing the woofer itself. That went well — I drilled pilot holes into the wooden braces inside the enclosure. Amazingly enough, the wooden braces matched up well with the locations of the screw holes on the woofer. Score one point for measuring ahead. However, the grill cover for the woofer, which is supposed to pop in and turn into place, wouldn’t fit in place because the enclosure wasn’t perfectly round. I ended up using some ratcheting straps — come-alongs, basically — to force the grill in position and pop it in place. It took a significant amount of pressure; I hope that I don’t have to open the sub box up anytime soon, since it’s going to be just as difficult to remove. Here’s the grill, installed:

Blam.

I also found a good spot to mount the speakers. The front part of the top tube of this frame turned out to be an ideal place. They’re not on the handlebars, so they don’t affect steering, and they’re towards the front, which will help counterbalance the warp core when it’s installed:

Finally, I started looking at this pile of electronic doodads and thinking about making them into something cohesive:

The electrical bus box just came together reasonably quickly. With several false starts, but hey, it worked out well in the end. The input is through a vaccuum cleaner cord and will be fused close to the positive terminal of the warp core. There are four outputs — one fused at 20 amps, for the stereo system amplifier, and three more with 2 amp fuses for lighting. Here’s a shot of the inside, showing the electrical bus and in-line fuses:

And here’s the electrical bus system, completely assembled:

This will mount to the handlebars for easy access. An iPod can be strapped to the surface of the bus box to provide sound input. Next tasks are to complete the remaining electrical and audio cabling, and then route the cables. Woot!

2 Comments so far

No comments yet

Leave a reply