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Tongue Drum

author-gravatar 40oz Aug 01, 2015

I had a little bit of scrap wood left over from my diploma frame project so i decided to make a tongue drum for my daughter.
(Sorry I didn't document the first & last part of the build.)
I'm undecided on what finish i'm going to use and i may eventually round over the corners but for now i'm calling this project done. 

Photo of Tongue Drum
Photo of Tongue Drum

The box is Hard Maple, Mitered.
The fingerboard is Birdseye Maple,
The soundboard is Walnut.

Photo of Tongue Drum

I didn't have a wide enough piece of Walnut so i made up the difference with Maple & Purple Heart strips.

Photo of Tongue Drum

The underside of the boards are Dado'ed for a snug fit.

Photo of Tongue Drum

Meow? 

Photo of Tongue Drum

Gluing up the Purple Heart Splines.

Photo of Tongue Drum

Flush sanded.

Photo of Tongue Drum

Laying out exactly where to glue the templates.
I am tuning this box to a pentatonic scale so i figured i would divide the fingerboard in 5ths to give one template 3/5th's & the other 2/5th's.

Photo of Tongue Drum

Cutting out the tongues with a jigsaw. It was a major PITA and took a long time.

Photo of Tongue Drum

tons of sanding to do.

Photo of Tongue Drum

and a dry fit. 

Photo of Tongue Drum

Here i am tying to tune it but my daughter intervened & stole the show. 
eventually, I hogged out most of the material with forstner bits & cleaned it all out with a router attachment on a Dremel tool. 

3 comments

This seems like the sort of thing a child would cherish forever.

Great job.  where did you get the pattern?  It looks like one Steve Carmichael has on his channel.  I used one of the pages he posted to figure out the dimensions on my purple heart drum.

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