Brighter Fusion Blog

This is my take on the popular project of the wind chime made from a children’s rainbow xylophone toy.

Here is the one posted to Instructables and featured in Make.

This week I picked up a used xylophone toy at Savers for next to nothing. It was mounted on a big plastic tiger.

I felt a bit guilty stealing the soul from a proactive, educational, peaceful toy in order to make a passive noisemaker for the backyard, but I’m sure somebody has done worse by simply throwing it in a landfill. I also felt bad when the tiger’s cute head unexpectedly came off and clattered across the room. I feel guilty pretty easily.

After I extracted the metal bars from the toy, I experimented with various methods of suspension. I was disappointed that the pieces sounded so dull, but they are after all very small. I tried split rings, wire, zip ties, and the ball chain keychains that were specified in the project above. All very dull.

So I broke out some tiger tail (ha!) from my bead box and tried that. Success! They ring quite nicely when suspended on a V of the fine plastic coated cable.

What next? How to arrange them? I liked the elegance of the V design because putting the bars next to each other in the valleys of an extended W would keep each of them loose and wiggly, but constrained to their proper respective positions. They would also be oriented flat sides together, instead of edge to edge as in the design above.

I melted eight equidistant holes around the rim of a small round semi-disposable tupperware container and strung the bars on with a small bead holding the cable at the top of each hole.

Already the chime was a success, but I didn’t like the way bars hit their neighbors, resulting in musical dissonance 100% of the time. I suppose that arrangement might have worked better if the bars were sorted differently than in tonal (rainbow) order, but I don’t know enough about music to get the right order, so I decided that a separate striker would be best.

I began with the idea of one striker in the center, as per usual for a wind chime, but that would be very poor engineering, as it would hit each bar directly on edge, resulting only in a dull thud.

So I decided to hang strikers from the existing holes around the edge, in between the bars. These have the advantage of triggering one note at a time (unlike when the bars hit each other), and at least doubling the sensitivity of the chime to movement. Four is better than eight in that each note has time to resonate before the pendulum returns, instead of being hit from both sides. It results in a much more relaxing, delicate sound, IMO.

What to use for these in-between strikers? Something big enough to hit the bars now and then, with some mass, with a hole to hang it from, and preferably reclaimed from underutilized junk.

I finally spotted them across the room, hanging on the little hooks on the front hall mirror — house keys! I dug around in my boxes of ancient junk in the garage and found four matching silver house keys, all with the “KW1″ cut-out pentagon style that’s so familiar. Perfect!

Lastly, I put a string on a shank button inside the plastic bowl to hang it from and a couple of aborted DVD-Rs on the string to catch the wind (and the light).

I plan to keep my mind open for prettier options than the plastic bowl and CD-Rs, but the result of tonight’s waste of time is much less chaotic and clang-y than most windchimes. I like it a lot as it is.

It is not, however, quite as lovely and calming as this guy playing his giant xylophone chime in Wildwood Park, Chico, CA.:

Consider that a chaser for Microsoft’s insanity.