VACUUM BLUETOOTH
SPEAKER
The Builder: Derek Coulter@derekmcoulterCoulter, a Pittsburgh-based
industrial designer for Dick’s Sport-
ing Goods, grew up fashioning new
stuff from scraps on his family’s
Iowa farm: a zipline out of pulley
wheels and channel iron, a downhill
racer out of a 2x6 and old cabinet
doors.
The best thing about upcycling,
Coulter says, “is taking somethingthat has lived a good life and giving it
a second chance.” That was the case
with the Cadillac vacuum cleaner
he salvaged from his late grand-
mother’s junk pile. His idea: turn the
beat-up appliance into a functioning
Bluetooth speaker.
Once Coulter stripped the vac-
uum down and discovered it was
a sheet-metal cylinder, he fetched
a few basic materials—including
deconstructed Sony speakers, a
Lepai mini amplifier, and 5- and
12-volt power bricks for the USB and
power, respectively—and figured out
how to make them all fit together.It wasn’t easy. “The hardest part
was choosing the order of opera-
tions—there was a lot of standing
and staring into space before each
step,” Coulter says. Plus, he’s still
honing his electrical skills, “so I don’t
leave [the speaker] plugged in when
it isn’t in use,” he says. “I’d rather
not burn my apartment down if I
messed something up in there.”
Still, after a couple weeks of
work and expected bumps, Coulter
has a retrotastic device that
“sounds great and gets plenty loud,”
he says. “I got exactly what I wanted
out of the process.”We asked you to grab your
old junk and repurpose it into
a brand-new creation. Here’s
what you built.
34 September/October 2020
READER
PROJECT:
Make
Something
Old Into
Something
Cool
Pro Challenge
// BY A NDRE W DA NIELS //9