OK, so it's not ALL maple. But it is for the most part. My son Matthew and I were looking for a new project, and for some reason wind chimes seemed like a cool idea. In retrospect, we might should've thought through it a little more. :gar-Bi It turned out a little more difficult than we thought. We started with a piece of maple, about 12" long and around 1 1/2" x 1", somewhere in there. The specifics weren't important.
Here's a picture of our first piece of wood for the chimes.
After getting the piece cut, we took a "somewhat" long 3/8" drill bit and drilled through the center from one end of the chime blank to the other. The first one went off without a hitch. "This is gonna be easy" we said. Boy were we wrong. :gar-La;
We mounted the blank on the lathe and turned away. A short time later we had a nice, pretty wooden chime. We confidently mounted the next blank to drill and drilled away. It blew up. And I do mean blew up. I guess the bit got just a "little" too hot. :wmad: We figured that's ok, stuff happens. We trashed that blank and drilled the next one, albeit with a little more care taken to cool the bit off. Drilled great.:gar-Bi Then it tore through when we were turning it. :BangHead: Had it "almost" to the right size and a huge chunk came out. Feeling defeated, we drilled and attempted to turn another. Sanded right through it. :gar-Cr
Five attempts later, we had two whole chimes with no extra holes. :icon_cheersYAHOO!!!!:icon_cheers The rest went easier. (If anybody asks, we planned it that way. Getting all of the trouble out of the way early.:rotflm
Turnin', turnin' turnin'
Keep them chimes a'turnin'
WIND CHIMES!!!
Now we need a striker, clapper, chime hitter thing-a-ma-jiggy. This was back in comfortable territory. We felt relatively confident that we could get a rounded disk turned with little or no trouble. It came out well, again made of maple (maybe, I think. Looks kinda like maple).
Next we needed to get the finish on the chimes and "clapicker", after a quick but thorough sanding. We used spray Minwax Helmsman Spar Urethane, Semi-Gloss to finish them, just to get a finished and kinda shiny look.
We drilled small holes in the tops of the chimes for the string to go through, hung them up, and finished them with the spar urethane mentioned above.
Now we needed a top. Luckily I'd started turning a bowl a while back and didn't finish it. One of those quickie projects that you start for stress relief but lose interest in. It worked out beautifully. It was bowlish shaped, with a flat top and bottom and exactly the right size. It's cherry wood instead of the maple we used for the rest, but this was an experiment anyway and we thought the color difference may be a good thing. We finished it with the same minwax we'd used on the rest of the chimes and it came out rather nicely, if I may say so.:wsmile:
Now came time to tune the chimes. Ugh. :eusa_thin I found several references saying that the blues pentatonic scale makes for a beautiful sound in wind chimes, so we shot for that. We took the chimes one by one and checked the sound on them with my son's guitar tuner. After seeing the initial note, we went from there and got them to the appropriate note. This was achieved by cutting small slivers off of the end of the chimes with the miter saw and checking the sound after each sliver. Kinda scary after we'd spent so much time turning these five little tubes. At least, the first couple were kinda scary. Not so bad after them.
Next we strung it all up and tested the sound together. I was happy with the sound, but I think our clapicker was a little low. :dontknow:
Soooo, we unstrung it and redid it. This time with a little more attention to detail.
Then we realized we needed more than just a clapicker, we needed a wind catcher swingy thing. (Can you keep up with all my technical terms?:gar-La So we took a piece of maple and cut a smallish triangle piece on the scroll saw and hung it underneath the chimes. We're finally finished.:icon_thum Even though it was only a two day project, with the second day done between churches and after the evening service, it seemed like a long project.
There're still a few things we need to do. The wind catcher swingy thing is a little too heavy and won't swing without gale force winds. We need to make a thinner and larger surfaced piece to catch the wind and it'll swing better, which we plan to do. We didn't leave quite enough area between the clapicker and the chimes so it doesn't have enough swing distance to make a very loud noise. Lastly, the chimes should've been bigger. As it stands they're not very loud. They sound beautiful but not quite loud enough. Going forward I think we'll be making aluminum tubes and focusing more on the other parts for woodworking, but it was a great learning experience. And most importantly, my son and I had FUN!! :eusa_danc
And if I may say so myself, I think they turned out rather well for a first attempt with no plans or experiece in wind chiming.
Thanks for reading.
Here's a picture of our first piece of wood for the chimes.
After getting the piece cut, we took a "somewhat" long 3/8" drill bit and drilled through the center from one end of the chime blank to the other. The first one went off without a hitch. "This is gonna be easy" we said. Boy were we wrong. :gar-La;
We mounted the blank on the lathe and turned away. A short time later we had a nice, pretty wooden chime. We confidently mounted the next blank to drill and drilled away. It blew up. And I do mean blew up. I guess the bit got just a "little" too hot. :wmad: We figured that's ok, stuff happens. We trashed that blank and drilled the next one, albeit with a little more care taken to cool the bit off. Drilled great.:gar-Bi Then it tore through when we were turning it. :BangHead: Had it "almost" to the right size and a huge chunk came out. Feeling defeated, we drilled and attempted to turn another. Sanded right through it. :gar-Cr
Five attempts later, we had two whole chimes with no extra holes. :icon_cheersYAHOO!!!!:icon_cheers The rest went easier. (If anybody asks, we planned it that way. Getting all of the trouble out of the way early.:rotflm
Turnin', turnin' turnin'
Keep them chimes a'turnin'
WIND CHIMES!!!
Now we need a striker, clapper, chime hitter thing-a-ma-jiggy. This was back in comfortable territory. We felt relatively confident that we could get a rounded disk turned with little or no trouble. It came out well, again made of maple (maybe, I think. Looks kinda like maple).
Next we needed to get the finish on the chimes and "clapicker", after a quick but thorough sanding. We used spray Minwax Helmsman Spar Urethane, Semi-Gloss to finish them, just to get a finished and kinda shiny look.
We drilled small holes in the tops of the chimes for the string to go through, hung them up, and finished them with the spar urethane mentioned above.
Now we needed a top. Luckily I'd started turning a bowl a while back and didn't finish it. One of those quickie projects that you start for stress relief but lose interest in. It worked out beautifully. It was bowlish shaped, with a flat top and bottom and exactly the right size. It's cherry wood instead of the maple we used for the rest, but this was an experiment anyway and we thought the color difference may be a good thing. We finished it with the same minwax we'd used on the rest of the chimes and it came out rather nicely, if I may say so.:wsmile:
Now came time to tune the chimes. Ugh. :eusa_thin I found several references saying that the blues pentatonic scale makes for a beautiful sound in wind chimes, so we shot for that. We took the chimes one by one and checked the sound on them with my son's guitar tuner. After seeing the initial note, we went from there and got them to the appropriate note. This was achieved by cutting small slivers off of the end of the chimes with the miter saw and checking the sound after each sliver. Kinda scary after we'd spent so much time turning these five little tubes. At least, the first couple were kinda scary. Not so bad after them.
Next we strung it all up and tested the sound together. I was happy with the sound, but I think our clapicker was a little low. :dontknow:
Soooo, we unstrung it and redid it. This time with a little more attention to detail.
Then we realized we needed more than just a clapicker, we needed a wind catcher swingy thing. (Can you keep up with all my technical terms?:gar-La
So we took a piece of maple and cut a smallish triangle piece on the scroll saw and hung it underneath the chimes. We're finally finished.:icon_thum Even though it was only a two day project, with the second day done between churches and after the evening service, it seemed like a long project.
There're still a few things we need to do. The wind catcher swingy thing is a little too heavy and won't swing without gale force winds. We need to make a thinner and larger surfaced piece to catch the wind and it'll swing better, which we plan to do. We didn't leave quite enough area between the clapicker and the chimes so it doesn't have enough swing distance to make a very loud noise. Lastly, the chimes should've been bigger. As it stands they're not very loud. They sound beautiful but not quite loud enough. Going forward I think we'll be making aluminum tubes and focusing more on the other parts for woodworking, but it was a great learning experience. And most importantly, my son and I had FUN!! :eusa_danc
And if I may say so myself, I think they turned out rather well for a first attempt with no plans or experiece in wind chiming.
Thanks for reading.
