Hi,

This is my third Instructable.

Background:

I am an English teacher in Mexico City, and as such, one of my passtimes is to do these kinds of little projects. I have lots of "trash" - OEM earphones from cellphones and such. I prefer those in-ear earphones over the regular ones that are equipped with mobile phones, the reason is that they don't isolate sound as well as the in-ear types and they tend to hurt your ears after long periods of time.

So, doing spring cleanup in my bedroom and I found this pair of earphones with microphone and button to control music/phone calls. They're the regular type. I typically use the in-ear when I take public transportation and they don't have any kind of control. Therefore, a cable swap is in order.

Step 1: What We Need:

Of course, the list of things we need to make this project.

In-Ear earphones.
Regular type earphones with microphone and button control.
Soldering Iron.
Soldering paste.
Solder.
Tweezers.

That's all!

Step 2: The Modification Itself:

OEM regular type earphones.

Insert your nail into the donating earphones to separate the speakers from the bodies.
Desolder the wires. Now, these are Sony earphones, the wires are color coded, this will help you identify which side is which.
The cables have a knot that work as strain relief. In order to remove the body of the earphone, untie the knot. Then, just simply slide out the body of the earphone.

In-Ear earphones.

Follow steps 1, 2 and 3 from previous instructions.
Insert the new cables into the body of the in-ear earphones. You will need to use tweezers to pull the wires up.
Redo the knots in both cables and proceed to solder the new wires to the speakers.
Take notice: each speaker had a dot of paint to mark the positive side, solder the color coded wire for both sides of the speakers. For these Sony earphones, the colors are like this: RED/COPPER - Right side; GREEN/COPPER - Left side. So, red wire to dotted side of speaker, copper to negative side; green wire to dotted side of other speaker and copper to negative side. If you solder it incorrectly, nothing bad will happen, but the sound will come out as... "hollow", with a huge lack of bass. I did that mistake and had to resolder one side to correct.

Step 3: Modification Finished!

We now have in-ear earphones with control button to take phone calls and music transport such as: pause, next track and previous track.

But of course, I could've bought a new pair of earphones, but as I said at the beginning, I do this as a stress reliever. And besides, I save a bit of money!