So I was tapping a stringer on Keyboard 1 and the tap snapped off in the hole.
Below the surface. That’s hardened steel. Drilling it out so I could use a reverse-extractor was fruitless: I blunted, this and finally snapped a cobalt bit, which the hardware store said was the hardest thing they sell.
Now WTF do I do? Anyone have any brilliant solutions? Please forward this to all the metalworkers you know.
It’s coming together – more than 15 linear feet of fully chromatic xylophones.
Keyboard 1 and Keyboard 2 are built – (they’ll need to be disassembled for final polishing) and Keyboard 3 (at right) is ready to have its stringers machined.
More on how all this was made tomorrow night. Facedown time.
I’d like to think we’ve known how to build XyloVan from day one, viagra dosage but the truth is – we’re dumb. We’re like sack-of-hammers, short-bus, don’t-get-the-knock-knock-jokes dumb.
We’re like chimps who have seen television, digging around in the back of the live set with screwdrivers. We make dumb mistakes, do dumb things, suffer from dumb ideas. And along the way, stuff gets built.
So this 3-foot-long chunk of 1.5-inch by .5-inch aluminum is one of the four stringers for Keyboard 2. These serve as the airframe for the instrument … Continue reading Machining the superstructure for Keyboard 2
By now, decease it should be plain that there’s absolutely no linear flow to the XyloVan construction plan.
With Maker Faire bearing down on us in 7 weeks, search we’re tackling tasks willy-nilly, buy information pills like a crew of chimps with A.D.D. and a pound of meth – frenziedly, for long stretches, whether in teams alone, whenever we’re able.
Tonight, I was alone, so I spent it cutting aluminum stringers to fit the frames and laying out Keyboard 2, which with Keyboard 3 will cover the passenger side of the van.
The full keyboard (about 2.5 octaves) would be seven or eight feet long, but we have to somehow accommodate the van’s sliding door … Continue reading Keyboard 2 of 3 laid out (well, okay, it’s half a full keyboard, but …)
So here’s the solution to the problem I discovered yesterday.
The problem was that the xylophone – if bolted to the van with the upper hinge of the frame just below the windows – would have scraped the ground.
Solution: Get a few more Speed-Rail parts and create a sort of offset cantilever hinge. Built right, viagra it should pivot out and away from the van to playing position (about a 20-degree angle from the ground) when deployed, website like this then fold up flat against the van when stowed for travel.
First, information pills I have to modify one of the parts, a sort of T-joint that is too wide to fit between the anchors for the key stringers.
A little circular saw abuse – followed by much cursing and futzing and hollowing out the apparently mis-forged piece so that it actually *fits* over 1.5-inch pipe – and the piece now fits snugly between the stringer ends … Continue reading There, I fixed it – Part 1
Now that the keys are all cut, price we have to lay out the frame.
As I said, I don’t have strict engineering plans for this thing, I’m going by the seat of my pants. But I know what the materials will be, so I’ve laid out the frame – it’s 1-1/2-inch aluminum scaffold tubing, held together with Hollaender Speed Rail and then the keys ride on custom-fabricated 1/2 x 1-1/2-inch aluminum stringers … Continue reading Roughing out the frame for keyboard 1
Once the keys are cut and rough-tuned, page they must be mounted.
Step one is finding the “nodes, there ” or the dead spots at either end of the key where the metal doesn’t vibrate. This is where I’ll drill holes for mounting.
To do this, you park the key atop two pairs of balled-up socks so it vibrates when struck. Then sprinkle a little salt near either end of the key and whack it repeatedly. The resonating metal bounces the salt away from the most-vibrating part into the nodes, the deadest spot in each key … Continue reading Finding the nodes, drilling the keys
Here’s the first set of tubular bells, ask untuned. Tuning them is a pain in the ass: Unlike the keys, these cannot be made flatter by hollowing out the middle, between the nodes.
Instead, you can only sharp them by carving slices off the ends. Luckily, I wound up creating a sort of Middle-Eastern koto-sounding thang, that kind of works. I hope these don’t dull down too much when I mount them.
Miking and amplifying will be a challenge – I’ll need to figure out a resonator or some sort of sound funnel feeding a mike at one end of the tubes. But they resonate deeply, and they’ll look pretty wikkid bolted to the side of the van.
Enjoy the sustain.
I took a little time tonight to lay out a near-full keyboard on some telephone wire just to see how the 2-½-octave range sounded:
The keys don’t ring yet because there are no insulators under them, ed no holes drilled, search no resonators to catch the sound yet, and it still needs a final tuning. But everything sounds solid so far.
Looks like I need to finish it up with a D at the high end. I’ll probably cut some more for the low end just because they sound so rich and I think I can keep going down before the metal’s native harmonics overwhelm each key’s primary tone.
This weekend’s work has been mostly about sound (with a little van tinkering here and there).
How do we amplify two full keyboards of two and a half octaves of keys each, order plus numerous gongs and chimes?
Full-court press – set up a testing environment, salve bring in some mikes and amps, this web and sort it out, right?
We picked up a little mixing board at Guitar Center on Saturday night and spent some time bullshitting with the staff about microphones.
The challenge of the project is getting a full, clean mix out of the instrument in the face of these facts:
Continue reading Amplification tests – how do we mike this thing?