Drum 2.0 and Spring 1.0

The difficult part of this work is done. Sertaç has been absolutely brilliant, with the kind of mind, knowledge and skills to make this piece do what I wanted in a way I could never have conceived. A great collaborator.

But first I had to re-skin the drum. The Jubilee clip slipped on the first trial, above, and the skin lost tension. I popped up to the music shop and bought a larger skin (goatskin, perhaps? must check), made a template off the PVC pipe and cut out the circle:

 After soaking overnight in water, with a shampoo bottle to weight it down,

I re-stretched the skin over the top of the pipe, locating the clamp beneath the larger diameter flange to prevent it from slipping off again:

While this was drying, Sertaç and I went to visit the spring man in the old caravansari. What a great little workshop! (see next post for shop profile)

We found the perfect spring - right wire diameter, right spring tension, right overall diameter so it would be flexible enough to droop over the drum and easy to insert small things between the coils to gently drop onto the skin:

Sertaç likes to bend wire and rapidly and cleverly devised a simple piece that not only added interest to the movement of the spring but also became the manual crank handle:

The loop at the end of the spring engages with the 90 deg bend on the crank arm to prevent the spring from simply spinning on the handle.

The last bit of genius is how the whole thing works together. Here, Sertaç conceived of a spring sleeve, with one end extended to become the method of securing the device to the pipe.

He added two circular loops through which I will thread a nut+bolt after drilling small holes in the PVC.

Amusingly, by cranking the handle clockwise when it's on the right side of the drum, the spring coil of the sleeve tends to act like a worm-gear and the spring travels outwards until it reaches the curve. The sleeve then sits there skipping over the long spring, like the needle on a scratched record.

Once this apparatus is secured to the pipe I will start the really fun bit of trialing things to make small sounds. The current skin is still drying but already it sounds much more resonant.