One of the things that you will notice on this blog near the top is a small blue box containing a few ads. I have placed those there because for every click I get a few cents. it may not seem like much, but it actually adds up fairly quickly. Because I have 3 blogs that I am maintaining right now, (and likely a fourth coming soon) I can get a steady stream of income from these ads. I also have an agreement with Conrad so that my ads display on his blog, and we can both profit from them. Google will send a cheque in the mail once the earnings reach 100, and half will go to Conrad and half to me. The main objective of these ads is to earn a little money to help finance the project, because the cost of good, straight grained padauk can be considerable. and on the topic of padauk, I have a few small notes that were scribbled on a piece of paper while I was tuning:
- the first note I tuned was also the highest, C6. the thing about tuning, however is that every note starts high; as you carve or sand wood out of the bottom the tone gets lower. to measure this, I used a small chromatic tuner, acquired at Long & McQuade for about 20 dollars, a good price for a tuner of this caliber.
3. If you accidentally tune a note too far, it is possible to correct it by cutting wood off the ends. If you do this too much, however, the marimba will look terrible because the keys will not be be even. Also, if you go way over, it is possible that you would be unable to use the key because it wouldn't fit on the frame.
4. back on the subject of that first key, when I was tuning it it started an octave high. the first bit of sanding took it down to an A6. the next bit took it as far as a D#. unfortunately, the next bit if sanding took it down too far, to a Bb. This was quite discouraging, and meant that I had to remove some wood from the ends of the bar. This can pose quite a problem, because if you don't take the wood off evenly from both sides, it can badly distort the sound that the bar gives off. To remove the excess wood on this key, I used two tools, and later a third; at first a belt and disc sander, and later a bandsaw. long story short, I managed to bring the tune of the bar back up to where it belonged. the following image shows the first set of keys:
as you can see, the B and the G (second and fourth from the top) have both had to be shortened quite a bit. This is an early picture (as you can see from the date in the corner), and I later used some spare pieces of wood to replace these two notes with ones that were a more appropriate length.
Aside from all that, you can also see that on all of the notes except for the C there are several pencil markings. these markings show about where the curve should be because it took way too long too sand away all that padauk. If I had not reverted to the bandsaw, I would still be tuning the notes today.
Every morning I would have the same conversation:
Neighbor: What was all that noise?
Me: Just a woodworking project.
Neighbor: Cool. What're you making?
Me: dust mostly. it comes in two colors right now: white and orange.
Amazingly, I only shredded one fingernail during the entire Tuning process!
Well, thats all for now. I have an advisor meeting in about half an hour. Over and out,
Neil
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