Cable Drum Earphone Holder

Hi everyone! This project came out as a solution of a dire problem that I had – tangled earphone. I remember that I’ve seen in Etsy a listing of a wooden earphone holder, similar to the one below:

(Phote Credit: Etsy)

The first thought when I saw that is “wow, that’s so cool. It looks like a miniature cable drum”. So I sketched a design for a miniature wooden cable drum cum earphone holder. Craft sticks would be a perfect material for this project.

As for the size of the cable drum, I merely estimated the dimension which would fit in the project idea – small, practical and looks good. I ended up decided the drum’s barrel to be 10 mm in diameter, with a flange diameter of 40 mm and an inside traverse of 15 mm.

I only use cutter tool to cut the sticks. While its easy to trim the stick using the cutter, it’s difficult to cut the stick in a shape. Especially if the shape is round. The stick will break if you try to cut it this way.

So i cut the stick into halves, which make it much easier to cut and trim. I use needle file to smooth the edges and created the barrel hole.

The difficult part probably to build the drum’s barrel. I have to cut small pieces of sticks; aligned and glued it together. Then I folded it in cylindrical shape after gluing both ends.

This barrel is attached onto the middle of both flanges; so that the hollow tube will allow the earphone cable to pass through. To add strength to the flange I add more sticks in perpendicular to the first layer.

Final step is to add a small groove at one end of the flange’s edge. I didn’t further sand off the cable drum nor did I add a layer of lacquer because I kinda like the rough looks that it has. It makes it look like the real cable drum you would see on a construction site or on a road side cabling works.