cranioscopical:In an emergency, apply strips of Dr. Scholl's moleskin using gel medium for the adhesive. Looks like hell but works a treat.
-cranioscopical
Ahh, thanks. I had to search up on "Dr. Scholl's Moleskin" and "gel medium", as I'd neither seen nor heard of either of them before. Good idea for alternative use materials, and thankyou for the suggestion. I shall explore the potential use of both of them.
I guess the Moleskin would probably be a great fabric to go on the
surface of the cushions, but that (softness of the fabric) isn't an issue in the case of the Nokia Monster headphones, where the problem is the rectangular foam cushion around the earpiece. That foam is manufactured with a soft outer plastic "leather look" skin wrapped tightly around it and that skin has a seam. It is
that seam which appears to break down first, releasing the squashed-in foam contents inside and which latter is then free to expand and return to its normal cut shape. So it just sort of falls apart into two pieces - the outer plastic skin, and the (now expanded) foam cushion that had been compressed inside it. It's a mess and obstructs the sound waves emanating from the earphone speaker.
It was infeasible to attempt to restore the cushions to their original manufactured state. So, I removed the two pieces, cut down the now expanded foam to shape (so the speakers would not be obscured (and sound waves would be unobstructed) and trimmed and attached the now roughly flat skin on top with duct tape holding it to the hard plastic outer case of the earpiece. That held the foam in place and would have worked fine but for the tape adhesive breaking down into sticky goo, as described above. However, it was still an
on-ear headphone, you see, which - for me - is ergonomically not ideal (QED).
I knew that I wanted to somehow convert them to over-the-ear headphones, and had been eyeing-up some industrial sound-muffling (safety) ear-muffs as potential candidates in which to transplant the ear-speakers from the Nokia headset, but this would have thrown away the main structural part of the headset, which would have been a waste, as it seemed to be very good at what it was designed to do. It was whilst I was looking at a selection of safety headsets that I saw the replacement Tactix cushions for sale. They looked like I might be able to to fit them to the Nokia Monster headset as a bit of a kludge, so I bought a pair to offer them up and see if they'd do, and to my pleasant surprise they were a dead simple and near-ideal solution - NFR (No Fixing Required) and thus not really a kludge.
You can see in the photo below that - on the LHS - one cushion has been fitted/mounted. I used blue-tack to hold that one cushion in place for the photo, but in practice there is nothing holding the cushions in place except for the horizontal spring-loaded tension from the headset and the close fit of the rectangular plastic loudspeaker housing into the moulding on the cushion's backplate and with the ears providing
location. There's no weight bearing on the ears, because the neoprene cushioned band on top of the head is transferring the load to the top of the skull. It's "light as a feather", adjustable and very comfortable, with no uncomfortable pressure-points (unlike the original on-ear cushions).
In the photo, the other cushion is face down, exposing its rigid plastic backplate, which has a moulding that neatly accommodates the rectangular shape of the plastic loudspeaker housing - which latter you can see on the RHS (no cushion fitted).
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