Ruck

Looks great!!! Love the pics!!!

I was looking to put speakers in the hovi mic tips or get hovies that were already made but I did a lot of research on them and found you don't get the volume you need so I went with a 16 watt aker amp its very load infact I've had to move it lower into my ab plate because of the feed back may have to move it again. might try some acoustic foam also.

you can see my tutorial on the other electronics I've put in my bucket along with padding on a post here called UPGRADING MY BUCKET. However I have not yet got around to posting the fan part of the build yet.

I run 2 small computer fans blowing out my rear traps in my lid powered by 2 9v's wired in series. I've never had a problem. Plenty of power. I had 2 squirrel fans but the ones I got were way too big for i wanted to do so I went with flat 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" computer fans. I picked them up from a local computer store for $5 each. I wired them together putting in an on/off switch that i can turn on and off without taking off my lid or my gloves very handy. works great!!

Hey Al Good to hear from you Bro!!! What do you mean by how much and when???

Well there you have it, part 1 to my build, "The sound system" and "Padding". Part 2 soon to follow, "The Fans part 1". Stay tuned to the Ruck show for our exciting new episodes.

On the back side of the earphones I bought, they have velcro attached to the ear pad. I peeled off the backing to the one pad that has the sticky part you attach to the bucket and attached it to the foam where I measured my ears to be then tucked the wires behind he helmet padding.

So if you don't make sure all the components are in the on position the system won't work, if you don't have the volume control adjusted you won't get any sound. So you get all this calibrated before you put it the bucket cause it's so much easier that way. Once you install everything inside the lid, and all the components are on, flip on the master power switch and adjust the master volume control and the helmet comes to life!!! You can hear fingers lightly rubbed together from across the room very clearly its amazing!!! be careful at first cause you'll think you want that sound up but the first time someone makes a load noise, WOW you'll turn it down lol.

The battery boxes each have an on/off switch marked with the green circles.

The volume wheels on each board are nice cause you can calibrate the sound coming from each board separately then use the volume wheel on the earphones in the green circle as the master volume control.

It has an on/off switch on each sound board marked with the orange square, and a volume wheel marked with the green circle.

There are some things you have to remember about this system, it has multiple on/off switches, and multiple volume controls.

I wanted to test my sound system before I put it inside the bucket in case I needed to do some trouble shooting.

Once I had all my wiring put together I wired in the battery boxes, the battery boxes are made pretty cheap so I took them apart and added hot glue to all the wiring. How did I know this? When I was putting in the box it slipped and dropped down and pulled the wires off the connections inside, you can't use a typical solder gun to reattach the wires it melts the plastic before getting hot enough to melt the solder, I don't have a cold solder gun and I don't know if that would work, what I do know is the hot glue sticks very well to these components so I use that to reattach the wires and It worked fantastic!!! very solid boxes now!!!

The sound boards I got from Amazon, there for the earphones inside the lid so you can hear the things going on outside. there not voice changers but if you want a trooper voice board send Jim from Hyperdyne labs an email, he's getting ready to do a run on some really sick voice boards. there a little expensive but well worth the price. They are very rare as he does very very limited runs on these get one while you can It might be another year or so before he might do another run.

The only drawback is that the sound wheel is connected in-between the earphones and the jack so if I want to change the earphones I'll need to rewire the sound wheel so It's on the other plug that is wired to the sound boards.

I took that and cut off the male end and striped the wires cut and put on heat shrink tubing and wired that to the Dupont wires coming from the sound boards for the speakers. That way if I wanted to upgrade the earphones later I can use any style of earphones I want, they'll just plug in.