Though they can be quite useful with their cordless design, Airpods can sometimes look as appealing as a cotton bud sticking out of your ear on a public train.
Eager to give them a bit more class, jeweller and designer Pablo Cimadevila took a normal pair of Airpods and gave them an 18-karat gold treatment:
After removing the electronics from their plastic casings, Pablo cleans and measures the outer shells to make a special frame for them. He then pops the frame into a small tube wrapped and taped in paper.
The whole thing is put into a machine which pours a mixture of plasticast into it.
After the plasticast has hardened, Pablo takes the encased Airpod casings and removes the outer tape and paper surrounding the small tube. He then places the tube into a heating chamber for 12 hours.
While the tube heats, he simultaneously prepares a number of 18k gold flakes which will encase the Airpod casings in a shell of expensive metal. Once both the tube and flakes are heated, he pops them in the same machine where the melted gold can be poured into the heated tube.
The tube is cooled off in a basin of water where Pablo can safely fish out his 18k Airpod creation.
After some washing and cleaning, Pablo can start cutting and shaping the final casings for the Airpods. He cuts out the casings from the gold frames and files them down to make them much smoother. It’s a long and arduous process but seeing as all he has to do is follow the original Airpod design, Pablo soon finishes cutting out the gold casings.
Once the casings are shaped, he runs them thorough a polisher where they can get nice and shiny before being dipped in a final protective layer of polish.
All Pablo has to do now is reinstall the electronics and seal the whole thing off. After some last minute polishing, the golden Airpods are finally ready to go.
Now no one on the subway will dare make fun of you for wearing Airpods. Of course, their golden nature means they’re more prone to being stolen, but that’s a completely different problem Pablo isn’t meant to solve.
You can find more of Pablo Cimadevila’s works on his webpage. If you like the unique cinematography of his videos, you can find more of them on his YouTube channel.
