Discover Steve’s passion for tinkering with the best electronic mods

Learn about Steve’s modding hobbies

Coachable Heart: How do you describe your hobby?

Steve: Tinkering or modding, depending on what I’m messing with. Modding iPods and Gameboys. Tinkering to breathe new life into older items and retro game consoles and parts. Instead of tinkering or mods, some call it rehab.

I started by modifying nerf guns with my friends in high school. You can remove air inhibitors to shoot them further. You can also upgrade the nerf bullets with insulating foam tubes with BBs inside to make them sting a bit more.

Coachable Heart: What is your favorite part of your hobby?

Steve: Seeing the before and after is always impressive. Unfortunately, I often forget to take the before photos. I love seeing the end result when something is completely transformed. It’s great getting to use old technology in my day-to-day.

You get to fish from the bargain bin and bring things into your arsenal. Sadly, pieces are more expensive now though. Everyone started to do this because of the pandemic driving up the demand.

Coachable Heart: How did that become your hobby?

Steve: In high school, my friend’s sister broke her iPod. I bought it for $20 to fix it up. I learned how to open it and swapped in a new battery. My first learning experience came with the ribbon cables. Those cables can rip in half if you’re not careful when you open the case. So…I had to replace that too.
After this, I saw that you could switch from hard drives to SD cards, so I learned how to do that. I also tinkered with switching around faceplate colors and wheels.

Coachable Heart: What other hobbies do you have or have you had in the past?

Steve: I have built a couple of costumes for Comicon and an Anime Expo. Box Guy was my first foray into cosplay. I used boxes from yearbooks at high school. I carved angry sponge bob eyes onto the cardboard and added horns from toilet paper tubes. I used duct tape and drew on facial expressions. This was actually featured in deep comic con lore. Watch the interview of Box Guy on Dean LeCrone vs. The Mutants of Comic-Con.

I also made a Mega Man cosplay. This one was on a super tight budget. The Mega Man costume has a blue skin suit that only shows his face. I used two drilled-out five-gallon water jugs as the boots. I cut up a 2-liter soda bottle and spray-painted it blue with special touches to make the Mega Buster gun. I even made it so I could flick out ping pong balls as ammo.

I used to practice Martial arts too. I learned both Brazilian jiujitsu and Japanese jiujitsu. These styles were like folding your opponent’s clothes while they’re still wearing them.

My wife Grace, and I also made a sexy Snorlax (from Pokemon) for Gish (Greatest Internet Scavenger Hunt) in 2020. If you can believe it, I was able to reuse this one. There’s a bakery called Insomnia cookies where we live. One Halloween, they had a promotion to show up in costume for a discount. I showed up dressed as Sexy Snorlax and earned our whole order for free!

Gaming is also a favorite hobby of mine. I love video games but usually play solitary ones. D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) is a more social game I love as a hobby.

Coachable Heart: How much time do you spend on your hobby? How do you find or make the time?

Steve: It really depends on how many projects I have going at once. Sometimes there will be downtime when I don’t have anything to work on and I get restless and feel like I need something.
If I’m lucky, I will typically spend 2-3 hours on a Sunday. For longer projects, I have to schedule the time and estimate how long it will take over several weeks. I will work for a block of time and save it until the next free time. It’s a little tough spreading a project across multiple work sessions with electronics because of all the little screws. I found a storage container to help with the organization to make it a little easier.

Each project varies on time. Some may require that I have to ship in new parts and that can add time to the overall project. The actual hands-on time usually takes me longer than expected, but I would estimate that it takes 3-5 hours on average. It’s much more involved when soldering is required though.

Coachable Heart: How long has this been your hobby? How did you get started?

Steve: As I shared earlier, I started with the nerf gun mods in high school. For software mods, I started with modding a PSP. I installed custom firmware to play old NES games. I have also modded an old Wii, and of course, jailbreaking iPods. Another project was working on Switch Joy-Cons to swap the LED bulbs to change the colors.

It took me a long time to get confident to try soldering because I didn’t have the right gear. When I started, I was using a plumber’s solder which is a bigger gauge and a much bigger tip than you should use when working with electronics. In recent years, I finally got a fine-tipped soldering iron and the correct gauge solder to use. It’s more gratifying now, the right tools really make a difference. I feel proud when I can just look at it and see the mods without powering it on.

One interesting and unfortunate learning experience I had was while I was modding a Gameboy Advance. I was using a heat gun to melt the solder on a couple of components, and unfortunately for me, the heat gun I used was one that I got for working on repairing PS3 consoles. That’s all to say, it was the wrong tool for a small handheld Gameboy console. 

I got lucky using the heat gun on one GBA motherboard, but the second one I tried this with, there was too much hot air blowing onto the motherboard, and it ended up melting the solder on multiple other components that I wasn’t even intending to move. Motherboard components ended up detached from the board after their solder had reached melting temperature, and some were even blown away and completely lost because I wasn’t careful enough. This definitely taught me how to recover from mistakes, because luckily replacement components can still be found online — and the Gameboy Discord channel has many helpful people available to give advice with even careless mistakes of this kind.

Coachable Heart: Is your hobby a solitary activity or do you spend time with others while doing your hobby?

Steve: Generally, it’s a solitary activity. It lets me get some me time and zone out. I’ll often put on some music or a show in the background while I work.

I will say that the nerf guns were definitely more fun to do with somebody. It was fun to make them look tacticool (definition: Descriptive word for equipment or clothing with no tactical purpose; but looks cool) with spray paint.

There is a very strong virtual community when it comes to mods that cross platforms from YouTube to Reddit and Discord.

Coachable Heart: What skills or qualities have you developed while practicing your hobby?

Steve: I have certainly developed my dexterity. There’s a certain amount of gentle but firm touch when soldering or desoldering without ripping it off the motherboard and shattering it into a million pieces.

I’ve learned how to break through barriers. For example, if I run into an issue I used to be anxious but this has opened me up to ask for help. You will now find me quickly being able to ask nerds with the same skills how to fix it when I come up against a wall or make a mistake. I’ve even found that this helps in my professional work, the lessons are transferable. Getting wins outside of work helps me feel better and builds my confidence when I face challenges, no matter where they are.

I’ve had people ask me if I’m interested in doing this as a business but I’m not. I feel like this is about having the ability to express your creativity through whatever means are exciting to you. For me, it’s messing with electronics and putting lights on things that shouldn’t have them. I appreciate getting that opportunity for creative expression and am afraid it would lose some of that if it became work.

Coachable Heart: What is the most memorable opportunity you’ve had to use your hobby skillset?

Steve: Back when I didn’t have the soldering skills or the right equipment for working with electronics, I helped my brother solder wires in his electric guitar to make it work again. Despite the lack of experience and the wrong tools, we fixed the wires to make the guitar work again. It felt nice when my brother brought this experience up as a fond memory.

Selected highlights from Steve

Thank you Steve for sharing your story with us. It’s inspiring to see your before and after shots, whether you’re fixing something, or enhancing it to make it that much cooler, it just goes to show that change doesn’t always have to be bad.

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Let’s remember

“Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.” Robin Sharma

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Are you a hobbyist? Get in touch on Instagram or leave a note in the comments section if you’d like to be interviewed!