Another tiny weekend project

I like my workshop's speaker.

It is a Bose SoundLink Mini II. It's small and it makes plenty enough noise to fill the three-by-six metre metal shed. It also isn't smartshit which requires an Internet connection for imaginary reasons; it plays the music I want it to play, and that's all.

What it also was, though, was sitting on top of the toolbox. The toolbox has a hinged lid, so if I wanted to open it I would have to move the speaker first. That takes a whole five seconds, and that will not do. Instead, I decided I needed to attach it somewhere out of the way. And that is how I got sidetracked from making parts for the Rover P5, which is what I was actually meant to be doing that day!

First I chopped up some C-section galvanised steel that I got off my brother for free, folded over and welded the ends to close them (this makes it more rigid and also less pointy after filing down the joins). And then a magnetic welding torch holder made the mistake of getting into my line of sight.

That got sacrificed because I already have one of these in use. As I recall I have two because they came in a pack of two, not because I need two of them. And better than a speaker shelf is a speaker shelf that I could attach anywhere in the shed!

I welded those two things together with the free MIG welder, and tested it on the wall to see if there was any vibration from the assembly.

There wasn't, partly because the Bose speaker has a little rubber pad on the bottom which does a good job of dampening the frequencies that would allow that to happen, and partly because everything was tightly welded together.

With the concept validated, I welded on some little upstands at the front and the sides, made of whatever random little off-cuts I had, so that the speaker could not easily be knocked off the shelf.

Though this is indoors, I wanted to paint it so that it looked nice. I used a Jenolite colour called "Ultramarine Blue Gloss". Being a Jenolite Directorust paint, it's not particularly fussy about a perfect surface. I first used it on an old water tank I converted into an outdoor workbench/cupboard...

...but that's another story. In this story is the fact it's a nice colour that looks good on things in a workshop. With that painted rather imperfectly (but good enough), and my speaker given a rather overdue clean...

...I have a tiny, nice-looking shelf that I can attach anywhere to put my speaker anywhere I like in the workshop. And that's how I spent several hours to save the five seconds or so it took to move my speaker from the top of the toolbox! But it was fun; the best thing about having a workshop is making more things to have in your workshop :)