BM700 body modded to a C-37A look.

[k brown]

- Body tube and internal frame shortened; bottom of XLR housing cut away.
- Captive cable through hole in back.
- Head basket chrome 'satined' with sandpaper; drilled and tapped to accept yoke.
- Yoke from cheapie eBay 'kit'. 743 Microphone Capsule Internally Mounted DIY Microphone Cartridge Spare New | eBay
- Rustoleum 'Smoke Grey' paint.

Appropriate fairly flat-response edge-terminated capsule from AT2035 (very nice, quiet capsule when liberated from it's stock mediocre electronics and poor transformer (trafo much smaller than that in the 3035).

 

[kingkorg]

 

[Tubetec]

Thats a nice job you made of it KB ,
Is it the usual Sony arrangement ?

 

[k brown]

Nothing Sony about it but the styling ; - )

Only FET and RF caps inside, for use with external bias/power module.

 

[Recording Engineer]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes! Yes!
Another I’d buy!
Well done!

 

[k brown]

The whole idea may be a bit silly, I suppose, but I've just long thought the C-37A is the most beautiful mic ever mass produced - and I know I'll never own one.

So just having tools to use that have an even similar appearance makes me smile ; - )

 

[funkymonksf]

That looks great! Thanks for sharing

 

[k brown]

And the silliness doesn't end there . . .

Also tortured a pair of '700s into a sort of M49-inspired look. Couple of pieces of copper pipe, a bit of dowel, and the stand swivel from the shock mount they come with.

Sing it with me - 'too much..time on my haaands . . .'

 

[Recording Engineer]

While I love them all and am fully with you in the C37A, I think this last one looks the most like a finished, sellable, professional-looking, commercial product. Excellent work!

 

[k brown]

A couple of refinements to the mock C-37A bodies -

- Yoke reshaped to more closely hug the body; wide washers removed.
- Cable strain-relieved by securing to the bottom of the yoke with one of those tiny silicone rubber bands for braces. Grips quite tight - takes quite a tug to pull the cable out of position, but is nearly invisible.

 

[k brown]

For anyone who's tempted to 'try this at home', the trickiest part is drilling and tapping the head basket for the yoke screws. I found out the hard way (and almost ruined one of the baskets) that the botom ring is a separate part from the mesh and strap on the side/top, which has a flange at the bottom of it, where the frame screws onto the head basket; the ring and basket appear to be glued together.

Either the hole has to be above the center of the ring, so as to clear the flange at the bottom of the basket assy, or the flange at the bottom of the basket has to be filed away where the holes will be, so the drill and tap don't have to fight with it (that's what pried the ring and basket apart, requiring repairs that were not fun).

 

[MicMaven]

- Body tube and internal frame shortened; bottom of XLR housing cut away.

- Yoke from cheapie eBay 'kit'. 743 Microphone Capsule Internally Mounted DIY Microphone Cartridge Spare New |

Nicely Done , Old Man. Subdued, understated appearance - has a 1960s vintage vibe. I like the rear entry cable. The rubber grommet looks original. The smallish size and understated grey paint makes it visible, but not imposing. A larger, chrome encrusted model can make a vocalist self-conscious, but this would not. Sort of analogous to using a small mirror-less camera with a short "pancake" lens is less obtrusive for street shooting, opposed to a much larger chrome DSLR with honking big white pro level lens. It is hard to be discrete with a huge, obvious camera. Similarly, I figure a smaller, low key microphone might put some vocalists more at ease. To coin a phrase, "A microphone should hear, but not be seen."

Parenthetically, I have one of those low cost microphone shells on eBay. It taught me to be more careful and discerning before ordering any mic shell. There is practically no room for a condenser PCB in the lower portion of the body, so I mounted a dynamic cartridge and made it an end-address speech microphone. You did well to repurpose the yoke for this project.

Happy trails to you. James./K8JHR

 

[MicMaven]

Mr. KB: Did you do anything to prep the body tube, or just paint away? I anticipate you roughed it up with steel wool or the like? (My inner voice says one should always prep the surface, while my little boy voice says to just spray away and hope it sticks!) What did YOU do? James /K8JHR

 

[k brown]

The Zramos I made them with were already painted - not anodized, so on the theory that sometimes the best primer is healthy, clean existing paint, I just degreased with denatured alchohol, then sprayed two coats.

This stuff produces a beautiful high gloss, if you spray it just right - if the first coat is too much of a 'mist' coat, you'll never get high gloss on subsequent coats. Has go on good and wet the first coat, but not enough to sag.

Apparently, the actual C-37A color had slight green tinge - hard to tell, online pics vary so much (plus I'm red-green color blind, so . . .).

Same paint was used on the first 'FONY C-37A'. Looking for electret capsule manufacturer recommendations

 

[MicMaven]

Ha. I get it. So, you DID just spray and go for it! Well done. (I appreciate the application tips.)
James