Sanding and Varnishing...

This

More or less sums it up.

Also

before I forget, Thank you to mr. summers for lending me his chromatic tuner when I left mine at home.

Anatomy of a resonator plug V2.0

so it turns out that just foam inside the resonator plugs is not such a great idea... the main problem is that it does not seal, and it compresses way to much to be very useful to me. here is the inside of version 2.0:

this consists of a small loop of latex tubing, which is supported by one of the small foam disks that we cut. it is sandwiched between two of the wooden disks, as in the original design. it is then compressed using the same bolt system as the original resonators. 

fully disassembled. as you may or may not be able to see in this image, the tubing is cut at a slight angle to make it much easier to seal the resonator. if there are any leaks, the effectiveness of the resonator will be severely reduced.

in other news, yesterday we finished drilling the holes through the aluminum to hold up the resonators. the deadline is approaching, but I am fairly confident that we can have this project finished soon. maybe not by the deadline, but soon.

Jig!

this post is really just another photo dump. This time, however, it is mostly just a couple of jigs that I have used for various purposes during the project:

this is the jig that was used to make it much easier to drill the holes in the frame, by allowing me to position the drill in exactly the right spot and angle every time.

this is the jig that we used to hold the pipes for the resonators in place while we were cutting them with the hole saw.

thats all for this post. 

I'm working on another one, it should be up in a day or 2.

Information dump incoming!

over the last few days, I've completed quite a bit. In a nutshell:

finished cutting the arcs out of the resonators

cut the first four metal strips to length, and drilled holes in them

build this fancy jig thing for finding the nodes of the bars; this image shows how it starts, and after beating the key for a while, the salt that is sprinkled on it tends to do this:

the salt has collected at the points on the key which vibrate least, which is where we want to drill the holes through the keys. 

if we look back a few days earlier than this, we will find me cutting the final few resonators...

using a saw that I have officially christened "Medieval Torture Device A" to cut one of the resonators

 this is a looooooong pipe.

a slightly more effective view of the pipe

and a view from the other side. 

thats all for now! more to come in the coming days...

Almost-Failure...

this is another title that deserves a little explanation...

after travelling to the island this weekend, I quickly realized that I had forgotten to bring the tuner. this meant that the entire trip was more or less worthless. luckily, we were able to borrow one from a local piano store. this meant that we were able to proceed as planned, though we did waste an hour or so trying to find a functional tuner...

Travelling!

This is just a quick update to say that I am going to the island to recut the four lowest keys. They are all both out of tune, and have problems with the arch. When I was cutting them originally, I did not stop to consider where the keys would be resting on the frame; because of this, the arch overflows onto both support points, which means that the keys are in effect useless because it is impossible to drill holes in them without damaging the arcs or affecting their tuning significantly. Because of this, I need to recut and retune these keys. this is a bit of a hassle. but worth it to get keys that sound good...