The Search for Harmony
by
Michael Stark
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY: Michael Stark on Smashwords
The Search for Harmony
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Stark
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Preface
I wanted harmony on my deck. It’s big, over 30 feet long and caressed by the wind. I wanted the wind to sing to me, but in a voice I chose. I wanted it to sing like my own personal angel, like music from heaven. With that in mind, I fingered wind chimes everywhere I went. Most sounded good. Most looked good. What kept me away from them was the need for more than just a good sounding wind chime. I wanted harmony.
Therein was borne the basis for this book.
My passion for wind chimes began somewhere in my early thirties. To be truthful, there wasn’t much passion involved at first. It was more of a money issue. My daughter had just enrolled in Appalachian State University and, while I loved the thought of her in college, the sobering aspect of it were the bills sitting on the kitchen table.
I was divorced at the time and living in an odd little house in Weaverville, North Carolina that looked like someone had started to build a castle and managed to complete one of the towers before they got bored. It squatted on a rectangular foundation that was maybe 20 feet by 24 feet in size. From that meager beginning, the house shot upward a total of 4 stories. The roof was flat and enclosed a small seating area. Around it ran ramparts and what looked like arrow slits. Just looking at the place gave one the feel of being transported back in time.
I lived in the basement apartment, which was one bedroom and opened out to a large stone patio. A rock wall ran down one side of the patio. The wall followed the contour of the ground, dropping from about 4 feet where it attached to the side of the house to only about 6 inches in height at the far end of the patio. Right in the middle sat a series of stone steps that led up to the porch for the apartment above me.
I spent many nights on those steps trying to figure out how I was going to pay the college bills. If you haven’t done the math, a man in his early 30’s with a college age daughter means she came along early in my life. My last year of high school was spent as a father and working odd jobs to make ends meet. A stint in the military followed, as did more odd jobs and my own education. Odd as it might sound, I graduated from college a few years before she entered. So money was a distinct and pressing problem. Out of those nights on the porch fretting over bills, came three things. I began to write and sold my first article within a few weeks. A series of others came soon after, followed by a 3 year stint as a freelance writer for a local paper.
The second was another series of odd jobs, I was working full time at that point as a programmer. The pay was awful. Although I was a bit over 30 at the time, my position was entry level and didn’t pay much more than working as a cashier in fast food. What it did have, however, was an excellent benefit package that included health insurance. Perhaps more importantly, it gave me something to put on my resume. There were few other options available in terms of professional employment, so the issue wasn’t finding a better job, it was keeping the one I had and figuring out a way to make more money. I lived in a small town. Moving meant giving up time with my daughters. I figured I’d work 24 hours a day before I’d do that. So off to the odd job market I went.
The final idea that emerged from those sessions was the odd little memory of a formula for frequencies in an open pipe. I’d seen it in one of my physics books. In the roiling of thoughts, the idea evidently surfaced that I could use that formula to derive notes for wind chimes, build them and sell them. I was wrong. Wind chimes are technically bells and as such have their own set of formulas that are used to determine their resonating frequencies.
It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention. I can personally state that ignorance sometimes lends a helping hand because I didn’t know I was wrong for several years. Armed with the idea and access to my uncle’s woodshop, I started experimenting and soon thereafter, started building prototypes. My grandmother suffered graciously through most of it. Her yard became a veritable monument to wind chimes. I stuck them everywhere. For a while there, seemed like every low hanging tree branch sported at least one. I have no idea what notes those early chimes produced. I thought I did at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered I’d been using the wrong formulas.
Honestly though? They must have been fairly close because the chimes sounded good. Grin.
I kept it up for a couple of years. Wind chimes and freelance articles are what put my daughter through college. Somewhere around her final year, the “real” job, programming, started paying enough that I didn’t need to work so many hours. Wind chimes dropped off the to-do list first. A year or so later I wrapped up my freelance writing career as well.
That’s the background. What this book will teach you is how to build a four note chime that looks good and has soft, sweet tones to both keep you company at night and wow your friends. For those of you who insist upon a more standard 6 bell chime, the supporting notes and template for the support plate are near the end. So while this is dedicated to the chimes I built for my deck, the construction methods and stringing methods are essentially the same.
There a couple of truths to chime building. One is that you can easily buy a set for what it takes to make one. The second is that you’ll derive much more pleasure from the set you make than any factory made chime. There is nothing quite like stepping outside in the evening and realizing the music of the wind, is now yours to behold and tame.
What will be detailed in the following pages is not intended to be an example of what you MUST do. It is rather, a couple of designs that emerged from my own experiences. Feel free to take it and modify it, manipulate it, or just smash it all up and make from it something that will appeal to both your heart and budget. If you take anything from this book, take away the treatment of the bells – the chimes. The wood work can be anything that serves the purpose. The notes can be modified to notes of choice. You don’t have to use what I used.
I’m only addressing metal tube chime construction in the following pages. Wind chimes however, can be and are constructed from a variety of materials including shells, wood, bamboo, and plastics. Nor am I proposing to be an expert on anything, and am going to leave the mechanics and mathematic discussions to others. What you will find is a blueprint for building and tuning a good sounding chime that can serve as a basis for experimenting with any design you wish.
Have fun.
I The materials
Pipe
Chimes can be made from virtually any metal tubing. Unfortunately, the sound produced is not consistent between different materials. By that I mean, you can’t expect the same frequency to come from different types of pipe cut to the same length. Each will have its own specific length corresponding to a given note.
The premier wind chime material is anodized aluminum tubing. Virtually every set you’ll find in retail stores are made from aluminum. Anodizing is a process that creates a layer of oxidation on the surface of the metal. If we were discussing iron, we’d be talking rust. Different metals however, oxidize in different ways. Copper, over time, will develop a light greenish patina. The Statue of Liberty is actually made from copper. Its distinctive shade comes from the natural oxidation process.
In metals like copper and aluminum, oxidation can be a good thing. Unlike a steel bar rusting away, oxidation on these metals actually protects it from further degradation. The manufacturing process wherein aluminum is anodized oxidizes the metal in a controlled environment. What emerges is harder, and generally more durable. Firms that anodize aluminum typically offer electroplating as well in order to provide the finished product in a variety of colors. So, even though the set you bought at hardware store has a gold finish, the tubes are usually aluminum.
Aluminum is used for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the best and biggest is that the notes are crisp, clear, and do not require a half naked man in a loin cloth swinging a leather mallet to produce a lot of volume. The issue that arises however for the average person, is that anodized aluminum typically is a product you have to order and order in quantity. Even when you can find it in smaller amounts or find it at firms that will ship it in custom sized orders, the cost of just the pipe can easily run twice as much as buying a set of chimes from any retailer.
For that reason, the metal this book will deal with is copper. Copper pipe is readily available at any hardware store. It is relatively cheap. It is usually thinner than other types of pipe that are easy to acquire and not as hard. The reason we worry a bit about the hardness and thickness is because the harder and thicker the material is, the harder we’re going to have to strike it to produce the notes we want to hear and produce them at a decent volume.
There are ways around that problem. We can use different materials for the clapper or striker. I’ve often used lexan or plexiglass since the contact surface is very hard. But for the purposes of this discussion, all of our supporting parts, the base, the striker and the wind catcher or sail are going to be made from wood. I generally use wood strikers (or clappers) on larger pipe because I like the soft, soothing notes it provides and to minimize the clanging sound when the pipe is struck. I’m not a physicist but I would imagine the clang operates in a manner similar to the Doppler affect. That sound in other words, is the frequency compressed – which means it is not resonating at the note you so diligently tuned. Your chime or bell may resonate at precisely 440 hertz or middle A, but if you put a tuner on it, you’ll see the tuner work through a variety of frequencies before it settles back to that A.
That’s not a good thing. If you imagine a scale of notes, what is effectively happening is a lot of potentially discordant notes being introduced to your perfectly tuned bells. Wood strikers reduce that potential.
Wood
When I first began building chimes, redwood was the wood of choice. It was easy to work, readily available, and rot resistant. Times and costs have changed. Redwood is no longer stocked at most lumber stores. It can be ordered, but the cost can be prohibitive and the wait can be extensive. A quick search as of this writing yields costs around $12 per board foot for a 2 inch by 12 inch board and a two year wait. An 8 foot piece would cost you $96 plus tax. You can chalk up the cost increases to cutting down most of the redwood in years past for everything from picnic tables to decks. You could also buy several chimes for the cost of building a single set.
I like dealing with materials that are easy to find. When I started this project, I wanted materials anyone could get anywhere. That meant the specialty lumber store down the road that carries an exotic wood perfect for the support plate, striker and sail wouldn’t be much of an option for other people. It meant the mom-and-pop hardware store a few miles away that carries aluminum tube at a decent price wouldn’t work for everyone. That left me with the major home improvement outlets and hobby stores when it came to hunting down raw materials. The big home improvement stores carry a limited selection of woods, most of which is derived from some form of evergreen such as pine, spruce, western cedar or fir, The nod to hardwoods is usually limited to oak and poplar.
Of those western cedar makes the most sense for outdoor projects as it is attractive and resists rot. Unfortunately it is also expensive and most of what is carried is one inch thick material. Cedar is not the strongest wood. I would not recommend its usage in any chime that needed to support any real weight unless 2” thick stock was used. I have seen the thinner boards crack and break along grain lines too often to trust it where weight is a consideration. If I were working with aluminum tubing, weight would be much less of an issue as a given length of aluminum tubing is much lighter than an equal section of copper pipe. Since I’m not willing to spend $40 or $50 for what amounts to less than a board foot, cedar is out.
Where that leaves me in dealing with readily available materials is choosing between oak and poplar. Neither is rot resistant. Oak especially seems to degrade quickly when exposed to water. Neither is a great choice. However, either of the two will suffice if preserved properly - especially for a project where the result is often hung in a somewhat protected area such as a porch or eave - and in my case, a covered deck. If you intend to hang your finished chime in the weather, I would suggest western cedar, but would recommend a thicker stock than 1”.
The truth is you can make the wood parts from just about any wood as long as it is properly preserved. So use what you have or let your economics and aesthetics drive your choices. I generally have some oak lying around and like to use it for the striker if nothing else. Rigid copper pipe takes either a decent wallop to produce sound or a hard surface striking against it. Soft woods generate little sound unless the wind is really kicking up. Again, the choices are up to you. These are just my experiences.
String
Nylon thread, usually number 2 size, is probably the most common string used on commercial wind chimes. There’s a reason for that. It doesn’t dampen the sound much and is much more durable than most other types of string. Fishing line is sometimes used, and works fairly well. Its greatest downfall is its susceptibility to sunlight. Since most chimes are hanging from porches or eaves, whatever string you use will be under constant attack from ultraviolet radiation. Monofilament line will last for years if you keep it out of the sun. Expose it however, and it degrades quickly. Chimes I constructed with monofilament had a 1-3 year lifespan out doors. Nylon thread lasts much longer. Hobby stores stock the thread. You can usually find it in the sewing section.
Other parts
aluminum pop rivets – these are pulled apart with the central pin used to pin the nylon thread to the base. I use them mainly because they’re aluminum and fit a 1/8 inch hole perfectly. There are aluminum nails on the market that will work as well. Pop rivets, however, also come with a sleeve. Once you separate the pin from the sleeve, the sleeve can be used to line the drill holes in the pipe.
Tools
The number of tools required is going to depend upon how much detail you put into the wood work. There are two lists below. You can make a good sounding and decent looking chime from the required list if you have the wood and pipe cut at the hardware store. What works for you will probably depend on your workshop and how much is in it.
Required:
drill with 1/8, 1/16, and 3/16 inch bits
knife or pair of scissors
tape measure (inches and millimeters preferred)
polyurethane
wire cutting pliers
aluminum pop rivets
brass swivels, size 3 from any fishing gear department
Optional:
hack saw
mitre saw
router with cove and rounding bits
3/4” hole saw
2 1/2” hole saw
steel wool
needle nosed pliers
wood stain
glue
The required list is bottom line. That’s assuming you have the hardware store do the cutting for you. The mitre saw is used for cutting shapes I like. There is no reason you can’t use simple squares or rectangles for most of the construction. For a small fee, most hardware stores, including the big ones, will cut wood and pipe for you.
You can also skip the hole saws if you change the design of the striker. I built a 6 bell chime with a rectangular support plate and rectangular striker that sounded good. A square will work. I use the bigger of the hole saws listed above to cut the striker for these chimes, but there is no law that states it must be what Michael did.