During my internship at Fablab RUC, my task was to help users with the lab's facilities and help the staff organizing workshps and maintain the lab clean and tidy. In my free time I had the possibility of developing my own projects.

I came to Fablab with lots of ideas, but since I love music and I love playing any kind of instruments I started creating my own instruments. I create mostly electronic proof-of-concept instruments, but also some acoustic instruments.

You will find the electronic ones in another post.

The first instrument I create was a Cajon, a flamenco drum that is basically a wooden box with strings or snares inside. A cajon can cost up to 150 euros, so I wanted to demonstrate that you can build your own with the lab facilities with less than 20 euros.

I found a very useful string tensioning system in Thingsiverse ​​​​​​​and I 3D printed it. 

I made the cajon out of plywood of different thickness depending on the side of the cajon. Plywood is not the best wood for the tapa(the side you slap), but I reallly like the sound the instrument make anyway.

I cutted all the parts with our CNC and I engraved the text "UTAKKN" with the laser cutter. I assembled all the pieces togheter, screwed the 3D printed string tensioner, put some rubber feet and glued all toogheter and this is how it looks like:

The second instrument I made was a Tongue drum. This instrument is a wooden box with one of the sides cutted out as tongues. You play this instrument with some drumsticks hitting on these tongues, each tongue play a note.

I cutted the box and the tongues out of scrap plywood with the CNC machine. I did the pattern in CorelDraw following some Tongue Drums pictures. I did the drumsticks out of 2 alluminium sticks with two magic balls on the top.

After cutted everything out I tuned the drum removing material from the top or the bottom of the tongues.

As for the cajon, plywood is not the best wood for musical instrument, but I proved to myself that is possible to create this instrument that are quite expensive very easily and with a very low budget.

I also made an instrument that I called "AmpBox", this is basically a small box cutted and engraved with the laser cutter with a piezo inside and some springs and metal stuff on the top. This instrument is not 100% acoustic because you need an amplifier to play it, but the sound you hear is actually the vibration of the box, so I'll put this project in the acoustic section.

This project took me really one hour to make it, but is one of the most funny instrument I have ever play. You can create a very huge quantity of different sounds, and if you also use some effects on them, you can really play with it for hours.

A musician friend was doing his birthday and was leaving the country and playing in the streets, so I choose to build for him a small, simple, light and personalized gift : a kazoo.

All is laser cutted, and as membrane I have used rolling paper or baking paper, finding out that with baking paper the sound is louder but more distorted.

After the first kazoo I did, I did a lot of them as gift for friends, with differents design and materials, but I don't have any pictures of them, so I'll post only the first models I did, that have a very basic design.