A call to invention: DIY speaker edition - William Gurstelle

Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Bedirhan Cinar

There has never been a time to make things as good as right now. Between what's available on the Internet, like the stuff on YouTube, the stuff on Instructables, MAKE Magazine, between the quality of your teachers who know so much and the incredible availability of parts, and tools, and supplies, there's almost nothing that you can't make, almost nothing you can't make, if you really try.

Now in my career, I've made a lot of stuff. I've made telescopes, I've made microscopes, I know people who made electron microscopes. I personally made flamethrowers. I made a four-story high trebuchet. Um, I've made some really dangerous stuff. My favorite is I made a battlebot when battlebots were kind of big. You know, it was metal, it had 20 horsepower motors, it had a carbon-tip fireman cut-off saw in the front. That thing could, you know, eat its way out of a steel room. I've made just so many things.

But not everything you have to make is dangerous to be cool. The point is, is that it's just fun to make stuff and if you've got a really good idea, you could probably do it. Now, there are different styles of making things. There's Do It Yourself and that's like, "Well, I'm going to fix the brakes on my car or put siding on my house," and that's an interesting kind of DIY. But there's hacking, where you take one item that's purposed for something else and turn it into something, you know, cooler, something different.

There's bricolage, which means making things from found objects. There's kitting, which means you buy a kit, something complicated, probably, and put it together. And there's inventing, and inventing is the best! The best kind of making things involves not just following directions from people who have done things before, but actually going out there, figuring out how to make something, doing the design yourself, and then actually building it.

Now, I don't have a lot of time, but I want to get you started on your own invention project, maybe. So what I'm going to do live and real-time and something that scares me, is, because it is live and real-time, is I'm going to make an audio speaker out of stuff that I found in my kitchen on the night before I came to New York. Okay.

So what I've got here is a block of wood. I've got some sand paper. I've got some pieces of notebook paper folded up into a rough "Z" shape. I've got two magnets. And, I've got some wire. Now, this wire is the key part. The four things that I need to make my own speaker is a diaphragm, a coil, a support, and a magnet.

So first thing's first. Let's start doing it. What I need to do is wind a coil. And what I'm going to do is take this wire and wind an entire voice coil from it. Now, unfortunately that's going to take a really long time, and I don't have much time, so I'm just going to give you the flavor of it. I'm going to take 30 gauge magnet wire and I'm just going to wrap it tightly together, and I'm going to do about 150 turns on a 3/4 inch wooden dowel.

Now why would I do that? Because I want to get my coil to have about 4 ohms of resistance. If you don't have enough resistance, you can do something bad to your amplifier. And then once that's done, I'm going to glue it all together so it's nice and tight. Now I don't nearly have 150 coils there so I made one in advance and I'm going to use that one. So where is it? Here it is.

What I'm going to do is simply hot glue it to the back of this yogurt cup. And I had to eat a lot of yogurt while I was experimenting, so I feel like I've got all the calcium I need for a while. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is take these magnets and glue it in the center of this dot. Hot glue, by the way, a hot glue gun, it's the greatest maker toy you can possibly have. I don't care what the 3-D prototype guys say, I love my hot glue gun!

What I'm going to do next is take these little "Z" stand-offs, see? And I'm going to put some glue there. Look how fast that bonds! My god, this is great stuff! And I'm going to do that, and then I'm going to glue this. And I'm going to center that coil right over those magnets so it's just above it. And now it's done.

Now this needs to dry. So you know how Martha Stewart would take the cake out of the oven, it's pre-made? We're going to do that, we're going to go to the Martha Stewart one. So this is the one I made earlier today. And it's the yogurt cup, the stand-offs, and everything else. Well, I'm going to turn on my iPod. We'll see if we get some music.

I need a microphone. Hello? It's on, good deal. So, let's play something. [Music plays.] Now this is really coming from a yogurt cup and it's kind of a neat deal. Might not be your choice of music.

Now you can experiment with different things. In fact, I did. Last night I did this. Let me walk over here. I made all these different speakers out of different things. Here's one. Because I'm in New York, I made one out of a piece of matzo. I made one out of a coffee cup lid. I made one out of a Tostito. The Tostito looks like a speaker, doesn't it? So, you can imagine how good that works.

And then last night during rehearsals they gave us some food, and they gave us these thick potato chips. You've got to hear this, you guys. This is just incredible how nice that sounds. [Music plays.] It's just incredible.

So anyway, like I said, today is the very best time, this age is the very best time to be a maker. You can make so many things if you put your mind to it. Get out there, pick something up because, I'll tell you, the stuff you make, the stuff you make is way better than the stuff you buy. It's special, it's significant to you, and I really encourage you to do that. Thanks a lot for listening to me.