Would Anyone Like a Mint?

First off, good news! My tiara will be on display with others Saturday in the V.I.P. lounge at Runway 4.0, the Fashion Departments big student show! Yaaaay!

Next up some good old progress updates:

The re-do of the ring in Rhino printed fine except for the three tori on the the top/front but thats my fault for not re-orienting the ring on the computer into a more easily printable postition. The Pacman brooch also printed fairly well and is in the display cabinet outside of the studio.

And, I finally got the asteroids decently cleaned up to where they look like the one on the right. that was achived thanks to our now functioning sand blaster in the studio closet! Now all I have to do is grind off whats left of the sprues, solder them together, and send them through the tumbler for that extra polish.

I also made this mock up of a thumb piano/ kalimba just to see how bad it would sound. By constructing this one and looking at one that the professor's son has I've learned quite a lot about about what needs to be done on the final piece, such as

• The keys have to be made of steel about three times wider than the bobby pins and arranged from smallest to largest in order to play the instrument with one hand.
• The bottom "bridge" should have a taller profile than the top "bridge" and be made from a brass rod.
• The rod holding down the keys should be made of steel. If not, it should be nailed down in more places than the ends or else the middle keys become loose.
• Loose keys make a godawful buzzing noise.
• there should be a great variation in length from one key to the next to create distinct notes.

Here's a bonus video of me playing around with my little Altoid kalimba, you can hear how loose the center key is and that most of the other ones are way, way too short. But it goes plink plink! A final thought on the project is that hyrdaulic die forming was tossed around as a quick way to make a hollow sound box, so I went looking through the drawer of old dies and found this one.

It's just wider than my admittedly small wrist and its the perfect shape I've been trying to think of for the sound box, hopefully I can use it or something similar. For now it's time to sleep on it, because tomorrow is the set up for the Runway 4.0 show!