VW charged my sister $130 for an oil change on the weekend.
That's awesome. Not sure what I'll be boing for a lathe yet. It's the part I've looked into the least in detail but will probably be the most complicated. Building a furnace to melt the metal and building the mold will probably be the easiest/moststraight forward parts. My ideal would be building a 3-axis CNC mill eventually, probably, but for now a lathe that I can use to turn the inside and outside of the shell, as well as cut the edges of the drum to a 45° angle would be sufficient. I've got some ideas rattli g around in my brain for now though. Part of me wishes I could afford/had the space for just buying a lathe, but building or buying it's going to be a while before this is done.
Oh, okay cool. So it is related to the steel drum concept. That's exciting. I suppose the most expensive part of the lathe aspect would be the drive motors axis control set-up. Also the tooling can be obscene, but you have to have good stuff. I'm friends with a machinist who finds good deals on stuff all the time. He picked up around 10k worth of machining bits for a few hundred recently. If you ever need something you can't find, I can put him on the hunt. I guess you would need a 3 axis machine for what you're making?
Not sure on the lathe. I've got a book on it and found some other plans and resources on the old interwebs. One of which claims it can be done for as little as a few hundred depending on the sort of scrap you can find. I may try that one simply because they claim it can be scaled up in size relatively easily, and I'm just crazy enough to think that if I can make a snare then the next logical step will be a full kit. As for sound, bronze drums are a bit darker than steel. Tend to have overtones over a wider frequency range. Cast drums also tend to be pretty sensitive and respond well at all volumes I've heard. They're heavy though. A cast bronze snare in the size I want will easily hit the 25lbs range minimum. And, interestingly, Danny Carey of Tool has a bronze kit he used for quite a few years. Apparently the bass drums weighed around 100lbs. This endeavour certainly isn't for the faint of heart.
Yeah, man I saw that and meant to comment. That sounds really interesting. I like steel drums, but I have no idea what bronze sounds like. I'm assuming this would be something similar though. What is the process for building your own lathe? Sounds prohibitively expensive, but apparently it's not.
I've got in my head that I'm going to make myself a cast bronze snare drum. Probably because I like doing crazy things. I assume you encourage my insanity. PS: not sure what I'm going to do about lathing the thing to it's final shape and size. Probably going to "have to" build myself a lathe. For reasons.
Here's a dream job. Thought maybe you could appreciate it.
Made me chuckle, and you like cars.
Probably. There's only 450,000 or so people in all of Newfoundland. Most of it's pretty small communities strewn about with one decent sized city and a couple of smaller communities being most of the population. And yeah, Nova Scotia's roads are pretty trout. Mind you, anything that isn't the trans Canada highway system usually is.
I'm an idiot, I forgot I went to Nova Scotia, not Newfoundland. Still, I imagine the roads along the coast line are similar enough.
