Re-Fixing My Headphones and Macro Photography (maybe??)

 Around a year ago my headphones were ripped totally in half.  Unfortunately I have no pictures from that sad day.  In an effort to have working headphones again, I soldered the audio signal carrying wires back together and taped the two halves so that they would stay on my head.  They worked great and only adjustability and RGB functionality on the right side were affected negatively.

Pre-Re-Fix Headphones

However, I recently felt the need to revisit these things and do it right this time.  They were a gift from my brother so I would have felt bad if I  had just left them.  My main goals were to get rid of any exposed wires, increase the adjustability, tighten my mic (because it slips down), and hopefully have no duct tape on the final product.  I also got my hands on a laser pointer lens so some of these photos will be enhanced greatly.

Disassembly was fairly easy but I had to deal with some pesky tiny phillips head screws.  I succeeded in only stripping them a small amount.  You can just barely see the damage in the photo.


After a few screws, plastic parts, and tape, I had the foam padding out.  A decent amount of adhesive was left on the fabric.

Adhesive Up-Close

I had wrapped my solder joints in an annoying amount of vinyl tape so I elected to pull the wires free instead of painfully unwrap it.  The wires broke apart quite easily.


The white wires in the photo were added by me last time because I didn't think that I had enough of the original wire to work with, but I realized this time that I did.  Here are some of the wires up-close:

                     
These are the RGB wires

The RGB wires were ridiculously tiny and I did not have confidence in my ability to keep them isolated and the flashing lights out of the headset at all times were kind of obnoxious so I just decided to disable them on the left side as well.

After opening the left headphone up, I could tighten the section where the microphone arm hinged.  To disable the RGB I desoldered the LED from the back of the board.  The only relevant equipment that I had for this was the soldering iron and I was too lazy to find something something to held to board for me so I ended up mangling the LED a bit.
                    
LED Up-Close


I could have reassembled at this point and had a working pair of headphones, but the adhesive left by the duct tape would not come off of the fabric covering the foam.  I didn't really try all that hard because I think I wanted to customize the padding.  And customize I did with fabric I've had so long I don't even remember how old I was when I got it:
Hell yeah

I cut off a strip about the right size, busted out the dirt cheap sewing kit and got to work.

It took a little while but I got all the way around.  I was left with a flap of fabric around the edge that I decided to glue down.  "Industrial Strength" means that it won't damage my scalp, right?  As long as it stays down...


While waiting for the glue to set, I reprised my solder joints with some proper heat shrink and then reassembled.  And to my surprise again, everything still worked correctly even though I hadn't been so gentle with it.
Success.



Addendum:
Well that went alright.  I really enjoyed looking at the macro photos after I took them so I'll include more here.  Also, I added question marks after "Macro Photography" in the title because, apparently, true macro photography is when the thing that you are taking a a picture of is magnified by a factor of 1 or close to that.  I have no idea what my magnification factor is.  What really matters is how cool these photos are: (sorry for the atrocious formatting)
Duct Tape

SD Card

Tack











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