Vintage Hipster Upcycled Bluetooth Speakers From Wooden Drawer

Why not upcycle like a skinny jean glasses wearing hipster welding a semi-skimmed caramel latte on a fixie bike!
Don’t you love the word upcycle! Oh yeah. Let’s put all that nonsense to one side and make something fun, easy and useful.

All you need are two old drawers or boxes deep enough to hold
speakers. Of course there’s a science to the size of speaker enclosures when designing for high-end audio. However what we are going for here is something functional with reasonable good sound and looking a bit hipster like! :-p

I built these boxes for a friend at work as it only takes about 2-3 hours once soldering, cutting and gluing are done. So here goes …

Step 1: Cutting Out the Hole

I used my faithful Leathermans tool to saw out the holes as the wood was quite thin and easy to work with.
Layout the speakers and mark out the circles to cut.

After cutting the holes either screw in the speakers or hot glue them.
In my case the larger heavier speaker I used screws while the tweeters are made from plastic I used hot glue.

Step 2: Crossover

Yes you could add a decent crossover, however I settled for a basic capacitor to create a high pass filter for the tweeter.

My tweeter has a cut off frequency of 4000hz with an impedance of 8 ohms.
You can work out the capacitor you need to put in series with the positive terminal of your tweeter by using a formula or this online calculator – http://electronicbase.net/high-pass-filter-calculator

In my case I used 4.7 uF

Step 3: Electronics

Here is the list of parts I used (apart from the speaker drivers).

Bluetooth Amplifier Module
Transformer power supply 12V 2A
Bridge rectifier
Smoothing capacitor 10000uF 25V
Speaker wire and wire for 12V for ground and positive
Hot glue and shrink wrapping for safety.

Step 4: Test Out the Sound

I used two chair cushions to cover the backs of the speakers to see how the sound in the low range would sound.

After testing the sound I had to EQ’d the sound in Spotify as it sounded
too boxy – not enough bass. An indication that the boxes need to be sealed up and have an improved crossover section. So it’s off to Ali Express to purchase two cheap crossover.

Above is EQ settings which makes the speakers sound right.
After everything was built I was really happy with the sound for about 30 euros I was able to make something very usable.

You'll need to cut some wooden to close the back of the speakers too, something about 3-4 mm thick. This important for the sound especially in the low range frequencies.