WIDLCARD!!#

Unfortunately due to final project dominating my time I didn’t do anything too crazy but I did want to take the oppurtunity to learn some tools that I hadn’t been able to before.

My idea was that I really wanted to work with metals and other hard materials - I had initially wanted to do metal laser cutting, but I found that the depth was super limited and so I switched instead to waterjetting. I did at least get to be trained on the metal laser cutter so that was cool!

I was inspired by a previous student who made a kalimba. And so I set out to make some kind of metal musical instrument - I set out to do a glockenspiel, which, if you’re not familar is basically a small xylophone made out of metal. I had wanted to do something similar in molding and casting week, but I heard that that metal was very non resonant, so perhaps this time could be my time to shine.

The first step was research - it turns out that most of these are made of either metal or aluminum, I personally think that steel makes a nicer sound, but we only had alumnium, so I had to use that. Unfortunately, there was only a quite thin piece for me to use (at least compared to typical orchestral ones which have a thickness of 5-8 mm).

Training!!#

First up was being trained on the metal laser cutter.

Followed by waterjet time - Dan said that it was quite a simple machine which it surprisingly was - the software/computer was as usual a bit old and finicky - it didn’t like my design for some reason and froze up.

Before training I stopped by Home Depot and got a nice cement block which I wanted to cut:

My group shares a room with another lab that has this really cool cement doorstop with their logo cut out of it and I also wanted one of those. However, my attempt was foiled by the fact that it didn’t like my design and also I realized that doing this would take a super long time which this week I did not have.

Overall, the waterjet was not what I expected - somehow I pictured something more like a really strong hose (which I guess it is), but instead it was a bit more “laser cutter in a fish tank” type vibe.

For the glockenspiel, I then spent some time thinking about the physics of how to get the resonant frequency of the bar I wanted, which is a number of interesting physical properties. First of all, the holes for fixturing the bars need to occur at “nodal points” where the resonance is at a minimum so as to not dampen the vibrations. Second of all, the resonant frequency depends a lot on the material, thickness, and resulting Young’s Modulus etc.

A really good resource for calculating these things was this. Overall, this modeling bit took me back to musical physics class and was also a good exercise in parameterizing in Fusion.

The actual job itself was really fast and easy - I just had to do it twice since the first time I didn’t put tabs and sadly my piece got lost to the waters of the waterjet.

I then tried this small one, but sadly it seemed to be very not resonant even so :( - it did produce a decent pitch but it wasn’t nearly as nicely sounding as I had hoped. My hypothesis was that it simply too thin a material and also possible a mallet issue (Dan very helpfully gave me a hammer to try, but perhaps I needed an actual felt tipped glockenspiel mallet).

I wanted to do more, and also get the cement block done, but sadly that was all for this week - hopefully I’ll be able to circle back later though!