Mounting the disc gongs

I fell in love with these things while scrounging through the scrap bins at Industrial Metal Supply.

They’re the sawn-off leavings of enormous logs of aluminum, this some of which had been many feet long and up to 12 inches thick.

They sound fantastic. And they look pretty graphic against the green of the van, viagra in nice contrast to the rectangular-keyed xylophones …With help from my daughter, I drilled holes in the doors and stuck three-inch-long 3/8ths-inch tap bolts through from the back side – backing them up with some cut-aluminum plates to help spread the tension and reduce weight stress on the sheet metal …

I soon discovered that hard-mounting the gongs onto the bolts between sandwiches of washers and nuts actually deadened them quite a bit. So I fashioned soft buffers out of strips of old bicycle inner tubes. Here’s the back …

… then we slip the gong onto the bolt and add another rubber washer behind a steel washer on front …

My daughter helped secure them with nylon locknuts …

So here’s what we look like from the port side …