Enough of these boring looking iPhones?
It's time to kick things up a notch.
What's up, guys?
Scotty from Strange Parts here.
As you can tell, I'm back in China,
and it's time to mess around with some phones.
It's been about nine months since I made that first video
about building my own iPhone.
If you haven't seen that, definitely
go check it out before you watch this one.
There's a cart up here in the corner you can click on.
When I was making that video, and I was I was first deciding,
OK what model of phone am I going to make?
I also needed to decide--
am I going to make a totally stock phone that
looks like the one that Apple makes,
or am I going to make something that's a little more creative?
And for a couple of reasons I decided
that I would make a totally stock iPhone.
There's more parts available.
There's more information available online.
And I already had a stock iPhone that I
bought in an Apple store, that I can use
for comparison and reference.
But, to be honest, it's a little boring.
And frankly, rose gold, not really my color.
So shortly after I released that video I set off on a project
to make a totally custom iPhone 6s.
But I got sidetracked by that headphone jack video
that I made.
You can check that out up here if you haven't already seen it.
And that project to make my custom iPhone,
it just sat abandoned until now.
I decided since coming back to Shenzhen,
I want to do more technology projects.
I'm going pick that project up and see where it takes us.
Now, there's one thing and you guys to know,
which is that some of this footage
was shot like nine months ago.
So it's why I'm still Messing around with iPhone 6s's, it's
why red backs are so popular in the markets.
Well, you guys will see.
Let's just jump into it.
I want to find the craziest aftermarket stuff I can,
and build a really awesome phone.
There's tons of nonstandard backs,
and of all different shapes, colors, and varieties.
There's ones with crazy gold inlay and diamonds and Dragons
and mother of pearl.
And it's all kind of gaudy.
It's very much a Chinese aesthetic
that just doesn't appeal to my Western sensibilities.
I know it's all considered very hip and cool
here in China, and I--
it just doesn't ring a bell with me.
So.
So I'm having to dig a little deeper to find something
that I'm really into.
So, I looked at all this, and like have a couple criteria
for the back I want to buy.
I want a nonstandard color.
I want a back with no texture on it, so just the normal apple
texture.
Because I want to be able to laser
engrave my own design on it.
And then I don't want an Apple logo,
because I don't want that to get in the way of the design I
want to do.
It's time to pimp this phone.
I'm headed off to the markets.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
That's nice.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
That could be cool.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
I don't know.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
Oh, no no.
No, no.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
The really interesting thing out of everything
was the fact that red backs are everywhere.
So Apple just released this new red color for iPhone 7s
last week, and everybody in the market
is selling them, but not just for 7s-- for 6s,
for 5s, for everything.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
No logo.
No laser.
That's pretty.
7.
That's cool.
That's really cool.
Probably not quite what I'm looking for, though.
That's pretty cool, too.
It's just painted.
It's got square corners on it.
That's unexpected.
[SPEAKING CHINESE] Really?
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
OK.
She said this back was 650 kuai, which is about $100.
This is multiple times more than any other back I've seen.
It's cool, but not that cool.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
Seems like a black box there.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
Thank you.
OK.
Bye-bye.
Picked up a back.
I did end up getting a red one.
I know I said I wanted to get a non-standard color,
but they're too cool.
Here it is.
I think it's pretty cool looking.
No logo.
No laser markings anywhere.
One of the other things I found interesting about this back
that I bought is how smooth it is inside.
It's gotten almost no like machining marks.
Which a lot of the other backs do.
A used one that I have, I think is original from Apple,
and it's got like all these machining marks on it.
So I'm impressed by how smooth this is.
And I don't quite know why you'd spend all the time to do that.
But, it looks really high quality,
so I'm hoping that it turns out this
is high quality when we got to laser engrave it,
because it does make kind of a difference.
The other thing that's interesting,
and I'm starting to learn this, is that all of these backs
have a piece of plastic that runs on the top and bottom
here.
And some of them, like this one, have two lines there.
And this one just has one, and it's pretty subtle.
But what I originally thought was,
I'll just get one that's totally red with no plastic
because some of them are pretty noticeable.
This rose back here has these pretty noticeable lines.
And I had thought, because I got this black back,
it doesn't obviously have any lines.
But it turns out it's got some really subtle plastic
on the corners here.
Anyway, I looked around a whole bunch,
and I couldn't find any red backs that
didn't have plastic in them.
And so finally I ended up just getting
one that has red plastic here.
And it's not too bad.
It's pretty subtle.
It's on the corner.
So I'm not too worried about it.
I started wondering, why is that plastic there?
And I think it's because of antennas.
So I think the three pieces-- so you've got one big piece here.
Then you've got another piece up here.
And then you got another piece down here.
And I think they all need to be electrically isolated
from each other, because there's three separate antennas.
So now I need to design what I want laser engraved on this.
The laser engraving booth will do a full back design,
I just need to give them a design file.
I'm going to use Inkscape because that's
what I'm familiar with.
But they're going to use Corel Draw, because that
is the program of choice here in all print shops
and engraving shops here in China.
Before I get going in Inkscape, though, I
need to know the dimensions of the back.
So I'm going to measure that out with some calipers here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So I'm going to dive into Inkscape
and see what I can put together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right, so let's get my logo out here.
That looks pretty good.
I'm going to make a design.
I want to do something with triangles.
This thing is based off of a logo generator.
I've gone online.
So it had triangles like this, which believe are equilateral.
So let's play around with it.
All right.
So I have a pretty good grid, now.
I wonder what this looks like?
I'm not getting this design to look
exactly the way I was hoping, so I'm
gonna take a break for tonight.
I have to think about some more ideas here.
I did find this processing sketch,
which maybe will be easier to prove that what I wanted to do
it doesn't actually look very good.
So.
I'm gonna have to come up with another idea.
I'm gonna get some late dinner and a beer, here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I gave up on the triangles design.
It just wasn't working out.
So I came back with a fresh head this morning.
I said, I wonder if I can put a photo on here.
And I started working through that.
And I've come up with a design I think to really like.
It's based on one of the photos I took in Hong Kong.
I'm going to try something new with the laser,
but I think it might be possible, but I'm not sure.
Going to have to ask.
I have seen them do white and black.
And the way that works is, the white
is where they etch off the entire top of the anodization.
And then you see just the raw aluminium
underneath that oxidizes.
The black is where I think they're just
burning the anodization.
So they're using less power for the black, more
power for the white.
I am hoping that they can do gray as well.
I watched someone had some black engraving done,
and I think they can just do it lighter.
So I'm hoping I can get three colors out of this.
And so I took the photograph I have,
and I've posterized it down to three colors.
White, gray, and black.
And so I'm going to put together a file here, put it
on USB stick, and head over to the laser engraver.
And see if my limited Chinese can explain what I want.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
No, no, no.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
OK JPG?
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
Yeah, to-- to here.
Here.
Yeah, OK.
Because [SPEAKING CHINESE].
Black and white, OK.
Oh, gray, no.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
He didn't really want to do gray.
But I finally convinced him by telling him
it was an experiment.
And I didn't really care if it didn't come out perfectly.
One thing I didn't factor in is that this is slow.
Super slow because it's rasterizing,
and it's the full back.
It's just taking forever.
I'm ready to do like three or four passes.
As you can see behind me, it's pouring rain.
Hanging out with the guys, they're
smoking cigarettes and watching League of Legends videos.
And I'm taking videos of the laser engraver periodically.
Another afternoon here in China.
So now we're on to the black one.
The big problem now is the black and the gray
are pretty similar.
It's only gone up 4% the power, so.
I asked him if he can make it even darker,
and it sounds like he can.
So, I don't know.
We'll see.
I think we're going to have to pass on the black, though.
To see if we can make it darker.
I should have said, they were watching
League of Legends videos.
Now the Apprentice is laser engraving
the inside of a whole bunch of red backs they just got in.
He's got probably a staff of 20 or 30 here.
He's doing all the inside adjustment lines
and moving the anodization for the antenna.
The speed with which the market has adopted red backs
is astonishing.
The laser was burning the edge of the plastic in this corner.
So he was trying to use a chopstick to mask it.
It's pretty sweet.
I couldn't really tell how into this grand, multi-hour
experiment this boss really was.
He seemed pretty bored.
But sure enough, we got to the end,
and he wanted to take a picture.
And by the time I got back to my apartment
he'd posted it to WeChat with an advertisement for his services.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That ended up taking way longer than I thought,
but it was totally worth it.
He did a really nice job.
Took a long time.
We had like six passes, something like that
and I didn't realize how long the passes were going to take.
It took a really long time.
The lasering ended up costing me more than the back did.
But he totally earned it.
So let's take a look at this thing.
Here it is.
The finished version.
I'm really happy with how the gray and the black turned out.
The gray and the black turned out
more subtle than I thought they would.
I was hoping that the at least the black would be darker.
And the white I knew it was going to be super bright, so.
But I like it overall, particularly sort of
under the right conditions.
Lighting conditions.
I think it looks really cool.
You know.
Grand experiment.
There were a couple of problems with it being misaligned.
None of the file formats that I gave him he
could open, except for a PNG, and even then he
really wanted a JPEG.
So I ended up giving him three JPEGs, one for white one
for black and one for gray, with the part
that I wanted colored that color in black.
Which makes little sense unless you're
dealing with laser software.
The problem was that he then had to manually size that JPEG,
and there were just not enough references.
So up at the top, look, it didn't come quite far enough
over to the right, and it is off a little bit at the top.
I did cut out the circles where the holes are.
And those don't look quite right.
But it's not that bad.
I think it's really good for a first shot at this.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Well, that about does it for this time guys.
I've got one more thing I want to do this back
that I think will make it really pop,
but it's going to have to wait until the next video.
As always, I'm Scotty from Strange Parts.
If you haven't already, hit that subscribe button
down below if you'd like to see more videos like this one.
There's one more thing, guys.
I need your help.
A bunch of you been asking how can you
help me with the stories that I'm working on?
And honestly the biggest problem I'm
having right now is research.
It's just getting information about the weird things I want
to go make and the out-of-the-way places that I
want to go see.
I would love your help in answering some
of these bizarre questions.
And if you happen to live in a city
that I'm going to, to film a story,
I'd love your help on the ground as well.
So the best way you can offer help
is to just follow me on Twitter.
This is my Twitter handle right here.
I'll be sending out periodic questions and requests
for help.
Thank you guys.
I appreciate all of the offers of help
that I've gotten thus far, even if I haven't had
a chance to respond to you yet.
Stay tuned for more adventures.
I'll see you next time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]