Thread: Tongue Drum, In Progress

I've been working on my tongue drum in woodworking class quite a bit lately. It has hard maple sides (plain cut, but with some figure), a padauk top, and a 1/4" baltic birch plywood bottom. The sides are mitered, with walnut spline pieces for decoration. The bottom is rabbeted in. No connecting hardware was used anywhere on the box, only original titebond wood glue. I cut the pattern out on a scroll saw (see my previous prototype tongue drum post for the pattern and some plans), since the jigsaw in the shop only had a super wide blade that couldn't make the tight curves needed. Unfortunately, this left quite the tiny kerf... I'm worried that the tongues might vibrate against each other. I took some 60 grit sandpaper between the cracks and tried to force a ripped-off top of a sanding sponge through, but this didn't do much in the end. The top fits between the two long box sides very tightly. When everything is fitted together, the tongues seem to resonate but with some rattling (which is probably from the top not being fully secured down). As it is, the tongues on the edges of the top seem to resonate nicely, but the middle tongues just cause all others to ring with heavy overtones. The next step is to tune this beast. I plan to use my newly purchased set of irwin marples chisels to hollow out some material under the base of each tongue, which should make the individual note more resonant. Then I'll try to remove material from the base to lower frequency, or remove material from the head to raise frequency. I'm using this program for tuning:

http://accordeur.sourceforge.net/

Here are a few pictures of the progress. I havn't done any sanding or finishing. Everything is still pretty rough.



bottom view:


standing up with bouncy ball drum sticks: