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Thursday, March 3, 2016

Mr. Sennheiser or the healing of an ill dummy head







Maybe also a dummy has a soul... I remember some cool footages where the yellow/black heads dummies where sort-of breaking before hitting the wall at full throttle...







With these images in my mind, I recently purchased a Sennheiser MKE 2002 dummy-head and matching binaural condenser microphones, to record the weekly concerts at the local conservatory of music or, shame on me, to document my solo guitar elucubrations.


The price was good, but... the dummy-head had a dip on top, an hollow.






Nothing to stop my purchase, yet... when I got the parcel and handled the "damaged" head, I began to think "how" to solve the issue.

The ash-tray-like dip...


While I was only tinkering on the matter, when I shared the above with my pal Lo, he immediately noticed a small hole near the threaded hole for mike-boom and instead of saying "let's try with a metal bar" he said "I'll try with some compressed-air!"


The day after I got a detailed description of the procedure he used to solve the dip.


... because, YES, he definitely was successful!








Lo used some air-compressor, but also if the dip was moving, it returned back as a depression... like a flat, punctured soccer-ball pumping.


What he made - genious - was heating with a paint-shop heavy-duty heater the top of the hollow head to soften the stiff blue plastic and using compressed-air, in the meantime, both to pump the head from the underside hole and to cool down the previously heated part... repeating the process several times, the dipped surface returned round like it should be.


The sphinx-like face of the Sennheiser's dummy-head changed - to my eyes - his raw, shapeless face into a lips-less subtle smile;-)






Thanking Lo...










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