Without the docking sled you'll have to manually plug in the RCA connections and power unless you figure out some very simple and fool-proof way of getting the onboard RCA and AC jacks to merge to something mounted on your wooden enclosure. Seems a bit difficult to me.

The price of an extra docking unit make it unreasonable in my opinion. A better deal would have been to simply buy a brand new 10GB player. Which is what I did.

I'll probably make some type of enclosure, perhaps out of wood, but using the docking sled of the new unit. If I was going to do something without the docking sled, it would be more of a simple shell, and not much of a docking unit. Something like that, with an exposed back, would be very simple to build. Since I want to avoid all this manual connecting and the wear and tear associated with it, I'm going the sled route.

Bruno

PS. nevermind the typos. :)