Everything done during the scrapyard challenge workshop was new to me. I have never worked with electronics before. However, once I got the basics it turned out to be a lot of fun. The fact that we could use junk to make new things in a creative way started to excite me once we started tearing apart the junk. In our day to day lives, not many people would think to use their junk to make new things. We would just throw it away. The things that everyone made during the workshop showed me that even if things stop working we can use them to make new things. They don’t have to be wasted.

The Project:

Me and my group had no idea what we wanted to make in the beginning and just started tearing apart whatever we had to find things that interested us. We started tearing apart old cordless phones, routers, floppy drives and a scanner.

After a few minutes we decided that we would use the moving motor in the scanner (which was surprisingly working) to make sounds when the motor hit certain parts. However, Kenny told us that a few other groups were trying to do something similar and we decided to go another direction.

From the floppy drive we tore apart we got this cool little piece of junk that we decided to make it a dj turntable. Once we decided that we were going to make a dj turntable, we thought that we should make musical instruments for all of us and turn us into the worst band ever. We chose to make a drums, a guitar and a bass.

The drums were made completely from an old router that I tore apart. I used the covering of the router to make the drums and the antenna of the router to make the drum sticks.

The guitar (which looked more like a harp) was made from the parts from the scanner. We took out the big plastic piece that held the glass in the scanner and put wires across it. Each wire made a different sound when hit with a pic that we fashioned from the metal piece on a floppy disk.

The bass was made using the same techniques that we used to make the guitar. It was made out of the remains of the router. Instead of using a pick, we decided that we would wrap one of our fingers in foil and wire and play the bass with our finger.

In the end we had a four person band rocking out some awesome tunes.