I was once actually going to make one of these.

In 2012, the soundtrack album I had always wanted came out, Jerry Goldsmith’s complete score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There had been an expanded edition in January 1999 (“Get a life? No, get this instead!” said a sticker on the album when I bought it at Best Buy) and, while it was an improvement on the original album, it still left out far too much.

So La-La Land Records finally came through and released their magnificent three-disc edition with the complete score, the 1979 original album, early attempts, outtakes of the orchestra being shushed by the conductor, Shaun Cassidy’s surprisingly manly vocals on a pop version of the main theme, a Bob James instrumental, and oh, yes, a track of isolated Blaster Beam.

Seriously, it’s just awesome. The best album ever released. Just buy it already.

Anyway, a year or more later I was able to part with a cruddy old piano that never stayed in tune because thanks to Craig’s List I found a much better free piano. But because disposing pianos is not that easy, I had the old one around for a while and developed a seriously stupid idea. This was to remove the sound board of the piano and try to somehow make it into a blaster beam.

Now, the stupidity comes from the fact that piano strings are very large and tense enough that they can actually be deadly if snapped. I knew that I didn’t want to mess with the strings once I read about them a little, but I thought about removing the sound board whole and attaching bass guitar pickups to it for amplification. But after seeing how thoroughly attached it was to the wood of the piano, I abandoned the idea as impractical and just plain stupid.

But there are some intrepid souls out there who have tried to build their own. And this guy has done a magnificent smaller version with mostly ordinary household items. Check it out: