These things are all about mechanical engineering -- getting physical things to work in the real world, usually for clonking things.
I was thinking that if I mounted the bonker mechanism directly on the resonator pipe, the hammer shaft would need to be pretty long to accommodate most of them. So I came up with the idea of a hammer arm pivoting on risers that straddle the tone bar. I'd have to engineer the actuator, but the possibilities are pretty vast.
This is where it all started! Looking at fog horns, train horns, basically forced membrane oscillation, I thought hey, what if I... and after a bunch of trial and error I came up with a fairly repeatable model for a horn-type sound thing! I made a couple of them with 2" and 3" PVC pipes, then I tried with 1" and 3/4" pipes and made a four-note cluster that sounds like a lovely antique luxury car horn, sort of like a fox hunt fanfare.
Using Sonor singles as the design, we're ideating bass bars using 2" x 3/4" maple and salvaged organ pipes as resonator boxes.
These bass bars use wide maple tone bars coupled to short, sealed wooden resonators. Instead of tuning pipes to exact acoustic lengths, we scale the cross‑section to maintain strong low‑frequency response while keeping the resonators compact and workshop‑friendly. Bar widths and pipe bores graduate smoothly to maintain consistent timbre across the range.
½" CPVC is practically perfect for prototyping a reed-based bass system—and with your pile of fittings, you can iterate insanely fast.
Let’s turn that into concrete, buildable ideas.
🎯 Why ½" CPVC is a gift here
subwoofer (bourdon) + midrange driver (reed)
🔧 Practical system architecture
Here’s a clean setup you can actually build:
✅ 2. Multi-rank chorus bass (this gets exciting fast)
You said you have 4–5 ranks.
Instead of one:
Layer them.
Result:
🔥 huge, chorused bass (accordion-from-hell energy)
Reed organ reeds alone:
Add resonators:
and they become full, organ-grade bass voices
I happen to have several ranks of reeds recovered from a reed organ, and I'm thinking of ways to enhance my bass section. Ideation just shifted from “build a quirky instrument” to:
🎹 designing a custom low-frequency acoustic power system
—and the reed organ reeds you already have are a major advantage.
🎯 Core problem
Your bass bourdon pipes are too quiet
This is expected, because: