Secret mens business.

A couple of weeks ago I had a phone call from Alex who wanted help with a school project. His reason being that I had a shed and lots of tools. He had to make a musical instrument having first researched the item that he selected. His final choice was something I had never heard of, a Mbira or Kalimbas which in simple terms turned out to be a Thumb Piano.

Firstly we needed a sound box so I bought two small bamboo boxes and cut the height of one down.
The reason for two boxes was that they were cheap and if we made a mistake we had a spare.

The lid for the box was made from a nice bit of pine which was rebated to fit inside the top of the box.

 

Except for the sound box everything else was made of bits and pieces in the shed, copper pipe, metal rods, nuts, bolts, glue varnish etc.

Alex drilling a hole in the top of the soundbox.

Cutting copper pipe to length.

A coat of varnish on the nearly completed instrument. 

The completed instrument.

The hardest part of the project was to find spring steel to make the tines from. I found an old band-saw blade which was cut into lengths before grinding off the teeth. The tines are inserted under the copper pipe and over the metal rods with the pipe clamped down just sufficiently to hold the tines in place. The instrument is tuned by sliding the tines backward and forward until to correct note is obtained and the copper pipe clamped down to hold all in place and in tune. Alex downloaded an App onto his mobile phone for tuning to the correct note.

I really enjoyed working with and being involved in this project of Alex's.

I hope we get good marks :-)

Check out the music produced on various You-Tube sites.