Scrambled, poached, or sunny side up? How about in stereo? Michihiko Goto (who goes by Gomhi) of Hamamatsu City in Shizuoka, Japan, carved these mini speakers from the classic breakfast staple: eggs.
Inspired by an image on the cover of the Fostex Company’s Craft Hand Book: Speaker Craft Manual Vol. 1, showing what appeared to be an electronic egg sounding off, Goto, 33, decided to make a set of his very own.
First, he emptied store-bought hen eggs by drilling a small hole in the shells and letting the goo pour out. Next, he cut the shells with a mini router and chiseled the speaker drivers’ plastic frames with a nipper before nestling one driver — a HiVi B1S transducer that converts an electrical signal to sound — into each egg.
To ensure the driver arms didn’t break their housings, he lined the back of each shell with cotton and used acrylic foam tape on the front. Each speaker rests atop an air-dry clay foot.
“Eggshell is harder than I expected,” Goto says. “For me, to mark the cutting line precisely on the eggshell is the most difficult thing. I heard there is a good tool known as Egg Marker.”
He wasn’t in it for the chicks. Although Goto describes the sound that comes from the speakers as “narrow,” he says, “Surprisingly, my wife almost took the sound from eggshell speakers for our favorite in everyday use.”
The music that sounds best through the eggs? According to Goto, it’s Water Strings by Masako Toda, because of the female vocal and acoustic guitar.
Since he made the eggshell model, Goto has considered turning his wife’s pottery, pieces of bamboo, even calabash gourds into speakers. But his wife specializes in urushi, Japanese lacquer used for traditional arts and crafts, and Goto says that’ll definitely be his next medium.
Gomhi’s Blog (Japanese): uziinoh.blog.so-net.ne.jp
ADVERTISEMENT
