After fiddling with my original HUD mod, I realized that I really couldn't care less about the actual Heads Up Display (the LEDs) part of the HUD. All I cared about was the sound. I like to play with the sounds on, because they tell me all I need to know about my status and what's happening to me and around me. My original HUD mod had an old earbud headphone connected to it, which was rather loud in my ear. To counteract the volume level, I tried to solder a potentiometer inline in the wiring. Without soldering, it worked, but as soon as some heat got to that pot, it went to crap, so I was without the pot again. Before I did this, though, I had picked up some "ear hugger" headphones because I hated how the earbuds would constantly work their way out of my outer ear. I wanted something I could WEAR and not worry about, especially while running around playing tag. Anyway, with a cheap pair of these, I found that the highest volume wasn't so bad. When the pot went to pot, I decided to just wire the new headphone directly, with no potentiometer in the way.
So what did I DO? First, I separated the headphones from one another, and cut off their stereo plug. I then stripped the casing from the end of the headphone wire. I cut the LED section off of the HUD I had been modding, and trimmed back the speaker leads. I chose some lengths of heat shrink tubing and slipped them onto the wires BEFORE I soldered the wires. ;-) Then, I carefully soldered one lead, slipped a piece of tubing over it, and soldered the other lead, slipped another piece over that, and another on each end in various sizes to taper the huge HUD cable down to a tiny single headphone wire. A little high-heat blowdrying and the tubing shrank down nicely to what you see above. The biggest plus is that the volume isn't too high, the speaker won't fall out of my ear, and if I do get bothered by the sound, I can pull the little speaker out of my outer ear but still be wearing and hearing the sound, due to the "ear hugger" headphone design. I've made two of these now, one of each of the headphone halves. One I used the actual HUD cable, and the other I chopped the end off of the now extraneous HUD extension cable.