Monday, September 28, 2015

The Frame

I've been working on the frame for quite some time now. It's coming together really well. I came up with a height adjustment system using telescoping, perforated, square tubing I found at Lowes. 




I cut out squares for the tubing to fit into the wood. They will also be bolted down with brackets.


Here are all the parts for the height adjustments system. I'm painting all hardware black.



This is about 90% of the base structure of the frame. I won't put it all together until I sand, stain, and finish the wood. Not included in this picture is a support beam that will run the length of the board in the center along the bottom. The pedal will also eventually be attached to it.


Thursday, September 17, 2015

Fine Tuning

The keys are finally completely done. The fine tuning process was meticulous. I first tuned each bar down to where my tuner was telling me was in tune, but I knew they were not actually in tune. This is because the ambient temperature in my garage along with drilling and sanding raise the temperature of the bar and cause it to lower in pitch. So when my tuner tells me it's it tune, it was actually around 3-5 cents sharp of the desired pitch. So I had to let the bars settle in room temperature for several hours and then check their pitches indoors. I made a table to make the process a little easier. each column represents different times I checked the pitch of the bars. For some of the columns I didn't make any adjustments. I just wanted to see if having the ceiling fan on or not affected the pitch, which it actually did to the degree of around 0.2-0.4 cents, which really isn't enough to worry about. For several times I repeated this process of making small adjustments, settling at room temperature, and then checking the pitch until all the bars were in tune. I tuned each bar to be less than +/- 0.5 cents of the desired pitch. I couldn't really tune more precise than that because my tuning app was so precise that it showed small differences just by the speed of the fan in the room where I kept them. But I tried to keep similar conditions each time I checked pitches. Here's a scan of the chart I made.



I don't really have any new pictures of the keys to show because most of the adjustments were so small. However on a few keys, I had to make drastic adjustments like this one:



As I type this I'm actually almost done building the main structure of the frame minus the resonators and dampening/pedal system. I won't have a picture of the frame put together until I sand, stain, and finish the wood. Then I'll actually fully assemble it.