These things are all about mechanical engineering -- getting physical things to work in the real world, usually for clonking things.
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:
What if I made a series of 18 rackett-type folded pipes each tuned to a single note to use as an organ rank?
Pretty quirky but do-able.
Racketts are made of solid wood cylinders with 6-8 parallel holes drilled lengthwise all the way through, with a caps at each end serving as alternating bridges, similar to how a series battery bank is wired.
I'd use a capped reed system, where the double reeds live within a boot similar to a reed organ pipe.
Coppy says,
🎯 Bottom line
This idea is:
After several different approaches, I think counter-boring the screw holes gives the best results. Here you can see the counter-bored bars on the left and the normal screw holes on the right.
And here's the device I just got to ensure a perfectly straight hole with consistent depth:
This is a placeholder for the John Smith Busker Organ.
Plans available here: John Smith Organs - Busker
🎶This is the way we make the springs, make the springs, make the springs!🎶
Here's an overview of how I fabricated the striker action return springs. The striker actions were made from salvaged upright piano dampers. It was very handy that they had return springs, but those springs were too stiff and brittle for our purposes. Here's a picture of damper arms with the original springs:
This is all about actuators -- electromagnets, solenoids, pneumatic motors, things that move a thing to make a sound or produce an effect.
This adds so much fun to the Glockenbox! The strikers are made from piano damper levers and flanges. I removed the damper felt and rotate the heads to use the set screws to strike the glockenspiel bars, then I thought they really needed googley eyes. Then they looked a little bald. I added colored plush material for hair, and the glockendudes were born!
I created 32 individual unique striker heads, some of them have names. This one kind-of looks like Jean Luc Picard to me.
I had to modify pallet magnet assemblies for non-organ projects. I removed valve stoppers and riveted extension levers to the swing arm to use them as actuators. The blue object is the electromagnet made from blue tape wrapped around the copper coil. That copper wire is about half the thickness of a human hair and is wound around a small white plastic spool, about 1/4" in diameter.
I wanted to share a close‑up of the hammer mechanism for my glockenspiel.
There are two levers involved in the action. The first lever is attached directly to the electromagnet frame. When the magnet is energized, it pulls this metal lever upward. That motion lifts the butt end of a second lever—a wooden seesaw lever—which has a felt pad at the butt end and the hammer head mounted on the opposite end. When the butt end goes up, the hammer end goes down and strikes the bar.