So its tough to find wood in the shapes you want at the lumber store, so I bought a 10 foot long piece that was only 8" wide. The edges you do have, try to align them so that they create borders and still look appealing to the eye. When designing the wooden frame, try to place the pieces to get as few exposed edges as possible.
In Step 7 I hypothesize how it could be accomplished without such expensive tools. I ended up doing it with a CNC at my college. Originally I wanted to use almost all wood for this project, but it turned out wood wasn't going to offer the precision that I needed for the tines. Initial designs were too complex and tiny, but the final design (image 3 below) is about as simple as possible, I believe. The tine holder design was sort of up in the air until the rest of the machine was done, so that I could do testing. This works great because it is flexible but snaps right back into place. The tine material was cut from the prongs of a garden rake. I found a belt that fit snugly around it to use along with a few gears and a belt for the cranking mechanism. The cylinder is made of softwood, 8" in diameter, that I picked up from a nearby carpenter for free. I selected 32 notes "around" the cylinder, because that's what you need to play Pop Goes The Weasel, or any 8-bar song using quarter notes. I could also tune in flats or sharps if I wanted some specifically, or get almost all of a chromatic scale in. I selected 12 notes across, since it seemed like a very flexible number of notes and allowed me to fill it with a simple 8-note scale in the middle, with a few extra high and low notes.
It will rotate and force the pegs to pluck metal tines, which are tuned to specific notes. I started with the idea: a large wood cylinder will hold metal pegs. Also, its pretty complex and precision is extremely important for everything to work correctly. I decided to use oak, and at $60 per 10ft plank I didn't want to waste any. Since this project was starting entirely from scratch, I needed to make a flawless design that could be easily worked with, and a good design always reduces waste.
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