Turn your office chair into a simple motion simulator!

Step 2 Prepare the Speaker

The speakers are not all the same. Basically you can find 3 different kinds of speaker:

1) (most common) you will see the membrane and at the center of it a tiny rounded membrane.

2) you will see the membrane and a smaller hi frequency speaker at the center of it (this one is not suited for our project)

3) (best for this project but most difficult to find, can be found inside woofers) you will see the membrane and a round flat 5cm disc at the center.

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In both suitable cases you need to remove the membrane, letting the lower (usually brown) membrane intact. Be careful not to cut the upper membrane where the wires are attached. If you make it correct you are going to let only a 2 cm large peace of the upper membrane removing the rest. This step is important, else your chair is going to play music.. :D

Now to the second part of preparing the speaker: this is different for the case 1 and case 3 speakers (see above). for the case 1 speaker you need to cut away the little rounded membrane at the center. After removing it you will see a hole, it is a cylinder on which the coil is mounted. You can use this hole to mount your weight. It is important that you do NOT deform the cylinder else the coil touches the magnet and it could start to burn. the best way to do this is to put a little peace of garden tubing inside the tube and then screw a big screw inside using it as a weight.

For case 3 speakers everything is easier. if you can find one of these it is better for several reasons:
MUCH more powerful
easier to build
usually a low frequency speaker
you can find these inside subwoofers.
in this case you need to glue a weight centered on the disc (use the correct glue!). thats it.. :)

Comments

[singarich]

What do you mean by 'garden pipe'? Is is a piece of hose or some hard piping? How do you find one that fits inside the cylinder perfectly?

[brendanvista]

I have the type 3 speaker and have removed the top membrane, but the lower one, ie. the lower yellow one in your picture is still there. My chair plays music. Should I remove the lower one?

[sharkyenergy]

hi! you can not remove teh lower one because it is used to hold the coild inplace. but you can cut out a peace of ti like i did in the picture, but you have to be careful that the coil is still stable. how many watt does your speaker have? what weight did you put on it? is the chair working as expected? a little bit of sound will allways come from your chair, but not much, you can easily overcme that with your game sound. hope this helps.. :)

[brendanvista]

Hey thanks. The chair is working very well. I used a flat round rock as the weight. (Hey, it works great). The speaker is a 120 watt subwoofer speaker. And of course, I never notice the sound coming out from the chair when I have my sound system on, but I also like to play with just headphones and that is when I really notice it, lol. Anyway, that is what I wanted to know, if it was OK to take a bit of the lower membrane out. BTW, you rock dude. And my chair is amazing!

[sharkyenergy]

hehe, thank you very much.. nice to see that someboddy is actually building something iv'e put on here.. :) hope you enjoy it and maybe check out my other tutorials! ;) cu igor