Made a musical instrument last night with my daughter

From dB Masters on Nov 07, 2006

My 8 year old has been studying sound and vibration in science the last few days. She had an assignment which required her to use her knowledge and make a musical instrument.

I took her to grandpa's machine shop and we scavenged the place for odds and end of tubing, wire and such stuff. Grandpa had some good chunks of copper tubing which we drilled little holes in the end of to use for hanging and sawed to different lengths, as she was studying the effects of length on sound. I taught my daughter how to use a drill press and she drilled the holes. We strung wire through the holes and put little rubber spacers between them.

We found a couple 2x4 chunks of wood and strung the wire through them and tied them tight and got top and bottom wood chunks, screwing and nailing them together to hold the wire tight. My daughter, again using her new found drill press skill drilled those holes and screwed in the screws. The bottom we just nailed, grandpa started the nails and the kid would finish them off.

The whole project was a lot of fun...my daughter got to put some of her new science knowledge to work, plus learned a little about building things, then we took grandpa out for dinner afterward.

So we now have a 12" wide by about 24" tall wooden frame with copper tuning hanging in it in legnths ranging from 20" to about 9" or so with each tube gradually getting higher pitched as it gets shorter. Interesting and fun for everybody.

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