Hello all. A few weeks ago I repaired someone’s computer and in exchange he have me a piece of applewood. I made a few small things on the lathe with this wood and now it’s time for a Home Made Xylophone. Let’s start cutting a piece of this applewood:

With the limited tools I have, I have to be creative. A band saw would help a lot in this case. But I managed 🙂

Now I need to remove a lot of wood:

And afterwards a lot of planing, filing and sanding the wood. I was a bit too enthusiastic with drilling, so I needed to fill the holes. It won’t be visible later 🙂

On the outside is an amazing pattern created by woodworm. Let’s make it more beautiful with gold-paint:

Meanwhile a beautiful piece of padauk wood arrived. I ordered it here: DesignHolz.com. This type of wood is perfect to make all kinds of instruments. Time to saw the keys:

A lot of filing and sanding is needed to make the keys and tune them to the correct frequency. Instructions are all over YouTube, so that was easy. I want to create one octave, C major. So the xylophone will have 8 keys from C5 to C6. I tuned all the keys with the help of Tunable.

It’s very cold in my shed, between -3C and +3C, but I have a good and curious friend supporting me! (Aiko):

Let’s make a foot out of beech wood:

The ring screws arrived and it’s time to assemble and finish the Home Made Xylophone. But first let’s give the inside an artistic touch. I glued gold-leaf on the wood and painted a crackling pattern on the gold.

Final touch. Engrave the keys and make 2 mallets.

And that gives the following end result. It’s a piece of art and it sounds ok. I’ve learned a lot to create more instruments in the future. I still have a big chunk of the padauk to be creative with :).

Music maestro! 🙂

またね (Until next time),
ロナルド