How-To Make Wind Chimes
Making wind chimes is not that hard, surprisingly. The most difficult portion of wind chime manufacturing is deciding which notes you want your wind chimes to play. Commercially built wind chimes use a pentatonic scale which is a musical scale with five pitches per octave although there is a large variety available. All you need to do is locate a piano or electronic keyboard play some notes randomly to get an idea of the sounds and what you like.
Homemade Wind Chimes
Here’s what you’ll need to make you own homemade wind chimes. First, some sort of metal piping made of either aluminum, brass or copper. You will immediately realize that pipes of different types make different sounds and ring longer or shorter. You local hardware store will have a wide variety of pipes for you to choose from.
Make Your Own Wind Chimes
Get a pipe cutter or hacksaw, and get pipes that have a uniform cross-section which essentially means they are the same thickness everywhere. Commercial grade electrical conduit and chrome plated pipes for sink drains work quite nicely. Metal pipes for vacuum cleaners aren’t too bad either. It just depends on your budget what type of pipes you want to get.
Use your hacksaw or pipe cutter to cut a length of pipe and compare it to the note you hear on the piano. Trim the pipe until it matches closely the piano note. Pipes can measure anywhere from a few inches to a few feet depending on the sound you are trying to produce. Figure out your other notes in a similar fashion and make sure that they are proportional.
For example, if your first pipe has a length of 30cm or approximately 1 foot and you want to cut you next pipe so that it’s a major third above the first pipe. The ratio for a major third would 5/4 = 1.25 or the new pipe would be about 26.8 cm or take off a about a couple of inches.
After getting the notes to where you like, you need to support the pipes 22.4% from the end. What this means is that you drill a small hole and use string and for the two pipes above that would mean that you be drilling the wholes approximately 6.7 cm and 6.0 cm from the ends or or around 2.75 inches and a little over 2 inches respectively.
Lastly, you’ll need to add clappers to strike the pipes in the middle when the wind blows them. Clappers come in an assortment of types, but just remember that the softer the clapper, the mellower the sound will be.
Wind chimes can be made out of a number of different substances besides piping including wood like maple and oak and glass to name a few.
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