Adventures using joinery, carving, shaping, or structural fabrication. Includes everything from simple jigs to full mechanical assemblies with wooden linkages, frames, or housings.
One of the early iterations. I tried suspending the bars above the resonator box with wire, as an "improvement" to the string suspension it had originally. I learned a whole bunch from this experiment, including the idea that I painted myself into a corner laying the bars out with so little room between them. I was building the frame from scratch so there was no reason to try to squish it all together.
Here's an initial assembly of the instrument with its resonator box suspended between plywood boards.
These are the dimensions of Topsy's case.
This is my street organ, based off of plans for the John Smith Topsy 3. It's not pretty, but it works!
I started work on this contraption November 2022. The construction has been an adventure in and of itself.
This is the second iteration of the resonator box. Initially I started with the concept of my Deagan Orchestrion Xylophone's resonator box and laid-out the bars side by side with a uniform gap between them and used nails for mounting pins on the top and nails between each bar to space them on the bottom. I essentially painted myself into a corner by making such a tight footprint, and the bars really didn't have much freedom to resonate. Eventually I took the whole thing apart and started over.