About

Cost: $ $ $ $ $

Difficulty: • • • • •

Time: 2h00

An actual old school Iphone.
This is a broken, old camera with a musical box inside. On the outside there are pics of my gf and me. The musical box plays the Romeo and Juliet love theme... because I'm romantic like that *wink*
It's the main gift for my girlfriend's 18th birthday. She loved it :D.

Here's the how to for the camera musical box, but I hope this gives you a little inspiration and y'all go make your own musical box ideas.
Sorry for the lack of pics, I didn't make any while making this.

Posted by Nathan from Nederland, Colorado, United States • Published 8th June 2010 • See Nathan 's 10 projects »

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Conn favorited Musical Camera 27 Aug 18:12
Lau5ren favorited Musical Camera 27 Aug 15:40

Step 1
Get your stuff: I bought the camera at a secondhand, charity kinda shop. They had a lot of different cameras but I picked this one, because it had a lot of room inside and it looked cool on the outside. And it has moving parts XD. The musical box mechanic I bought online for about 5 euros, but I guess you could, if really short on money, also destruct a babies toy with a musical box in it.
Step 2
Figure out how you want the musical box in the camera. I thought I wanted it pointing to the side, so you'd have to open the camera to turn the handle (see pic), but I was unable to make a hole for the handle in the side. I then decided to make the musical box face upwards with the handle coming out of the top of the camera. That was a much better idea. It now looks as though the handle is part of the camera, next to all the other buttons and stuff.
Step 3
Prepare the camera: The 'bottom' on which the musical box is going to be glued to needs to be right. That means it shouldn't mess up the sound. My 'bottom' was made of a thin piece of metal, so it made the sound from the musical box sound horribly metally and off-tune. I solved this by glueing a square piece of black felt onto it.
Step 4
Take apart the Musical box (for now):
If you have a musical box from which you can take the handle of, you are lucky. I don't know how else you would do this project otherwise.
I only had to unscrew 3 little screws.
Step 5
Now you can place the musical box in the camera where you like it and mark where you want the hole for the handle to be. Drill the hole, using a drill that's big enough (you could do that wrong, when you just eyeball it, cough).
Step 6
Now first glue the back of the musical box to the camera in the right place. Make sure it sticks really well. After it dried you can carefully put the handle through the hole and in the box and screw it closed again :]. Now the music part is done. Doesn't that sound nice, just keep spinning that crank!
Step 7
To make the camera more personal I printed out some pictures of us and decoupaged them on. Decoupaging means sticking the pics on with modge podge, or any alike glue, and after letting it dry, putting another coating of glue over it as a protecting layer. And voila, a great gift.
Step 8
BTW, I don't know if anyone noticed... but the text underneath the camera in the pics is a Dutch translation of Oidipus Rex which I had to learn for about a half in Ancient Greek and half in Dutch for my finals... And I nailed it!! Yeah! ^^Just some random fact...