Mister Jalopy's Urban Guerrilla Movie House

Those who are particularly good with their hands — or just like to read about people who are — might want to check out Make: magazine’s August 2007 issue. "Mister Jalopy’s Urban Guerrilla Movie House" will teach you how to hack a 15" LCD monitor into a vibrantly crisp-imaged movie projector that you can take on the road. (Mister Jalopy is shown beaming from the seat of the adult tricycle, complete with boombox, that he mounted it on.) This article contains tons of fascinating advice on how to do everything from turn two lengths of sewer pipe into a lens focuser to the proper way to mount a heat shield. This article is also for people who are not afraid of the words "Caution! Careful! Peligro! The bulb is very hot and bright. The bulb glass is a UV filter, so if it cracks, it will still power up, but you are being exposed to dangerous UV light."

How does it work? Basically, Mister Jalopy is careful, precise and extremely patient, and advises you to be the same. You pry up the back panel of an LCD display panel, remove the LCD screen ("Be amazed at the fragility of the LCD glass!") and set it aside — oh so gently — so that you can dummy up the measurements needed to mount the screen to a wooden base. Then you take a light reflector, a light source, a heat shield, two Fresnel lenses, and a projection lens and mount them at staggered intervals around the LCD screen — sandwich-style, like if a BLT came with the bacon, lettuce, and tomato set at different widths between the bread slices. Your finished product is placed within a fan-cooled, custom-built box.

Can you use recycled items like a car headlight, a halogen worklight, or your granddaddy’s rear-projection TV? Probably not, says Mister Jalopy. To make life easier (and access to your completed projector faster), you can buy a kit that contains all of the essential projector parts from a company called Lumenlab. Lumenlab also hosts numerous online forums that include in-depth logs of completed projectors.