About
This is another old university project that I was able to make fun for myeslf. It was an advanced woodworking course and we were tasked to ‘build a cabinet’. The assignment felt underwhelming and I was struggling to motivate myself to come up with a cabinet concept that I would be excited to build. So, I relied on the ancient art-school practice of deconstructing the assignment until I find something I can mess with.
I ended up really liking the idea of storage. Cabinets store things. You can put something into a cabinet and take it out. As for what I could store? I thought it would be interesting to try and store short little snippets of musical melody. After tons of design work, I essentially came up with this basic idea for a hand-cranked, ‘programmable’ music box.
The mechanics are quite simple, There is a hand crank that drives a flywheel. The flywheel drives a couple more gears in order to turn a large drum that you can put little pegs into to ‘program’ a little tune. While the drum turns, the pegs will make contact with these goofy little hammers that will rise up, and land back down on this weird little marimba-like instrument. It wasn’t tuned to any kind of scale, so it’s not possible to program a recognizable piece of music. Though not super intentional, I kind of like that it requires you to learn what the sculpture is capable of before you can start putting things into it with more intention.
Overall, the project was quite successful and it functioned pretty reliably for something slapped together out of a bunch of plywood. All the gears were hand-cut on a bandsaw and I ended up using some Lego parts for the programmable drum. I wasn’t able to come up with a better solution for the pegs as Lego utilizes a mechanical connection that prevents the pegs from eventually falling out which I couldn’t recreate in wood.
Process Documentation
