The Idea

I looked at many Jukeboxes on eBay, all were out of my price range. None were using MP3, CD only and being limited to just 50 - 100 CD's wasn't good enough as I have a very large collection.  After much searching of the internet, I happened across a site called http://dwjukebox.com/. Here was my first hope of building a jukebox. It worked with a PC, using numbers & letters for track selection. now for a cabinet.  Weeks of searching later, I had found it. The  "Ultimate Jukebox Plans"

I purchased the plans and downloaded them, reading & re-reading them over and over. 6 months later I managed to cut the basic patterns out of 15mm ply wood, these parts then hung about for another 6 months.

Spring had come and the weather was good, time to make a start                     

What Really kicked me off, was we decided to have a 70's fancy dress disco party. Me having found the software and got the music, boasted that we could have a jukebox for the party.

One weeks notice, was all I had. So I set to, one bright sunny May Bank Holiday. 20ft of 1" square timber was purchase for the frame (not one bit was straight, thanks DIY stores!) After much drilling,screwing & gluing, I had the basic shell, and started to fit the 15" monitor.

Those of you who are a bit more savvy, will realize I should have done this before gluing it together. Luckily I had made the back removable, measured all dimensions inside and worked out the position of the hole from outside. Drilled holes for the Jig saw to start cutting, Note: the better the jigsaw the straighter the cuts. My cutting was bad, the jigsaw was from a second hand shop, I struggled to fit the screen. Now how to control the thing? Having looked up buying buttons and the long delivery times, they wouldn't have been here in time, and wiring the buttons would be a steep learning curve. So I purchased a numerical keypad from ASDA/Wallmart, plugged it in & tried to configure it.   It worked great, now to cut into the box.... I Managed to get a fairly descent fit, so glued it in place.

Now time was running out, I didn't have time to strip down the old note book laptop that was to run the jukebox, so I wedged the whole thing in the back. Then I noticed the Keypad was numbered from the bottom to top, which would cause confusion, so sticky numbers were added to the keys, and the controls reconfigured & extra commands (skip track, pause, Quit, volume) were then configured. Perfect.

I filled over the screw heads & sanded smooth, trouble is all the imperfections from the cutting & drilling showed up. I took out the screen, masked off the key pad & hand painted white under coat and it looked rubbish. I then painted it matt black, not much better. Finally I printed off a large star shape & cut it out, I got some cans of car spray paint & went mad with it, over & over on top of each color, it was a hot day so dried quickly. Until finally I had something different, that looked reasonable. I then fitted the light behind the marque banner. What to call it & how to do it?

Luckily at work there was some old vinyl lettering being thrown away, not the full alphabet but some of it. I took them home and kept shuffling until I got "JUKEBOX" then out of nowhere came "STARS" How lucky was that. They got stuck on fairly straight & the "JUKEBOX STARS"  Jukebox was born.

 I was searching the internet yet again, when I found probably the best software ever. SK JUKEBOX from Salmon King. It's just like a pub jukebox with the album cover sliding over each other. This was rapidly installed and configured and tested. Perfect.

Plugged in the 50watt desktop speaker system and off we went. All night people were selecting music and dancing the night away, there were so many people in front of the jukebox that I moved the speakers to on top, to improve the sound output. The speakers were at maximum and putting the speakers on top just enabled the sound to hit you at head height, 50watts does not go far in a garden.