I feel like I'm giving myself an education in woodworking by making mistakes. Well, not the safety-related mistakes, I'm trying to be very conscious of that. No, I mean the mistakes that could have been prevented by a 3 minute google search before I bought anything.
See, today I bought a 4 foot long, narrow beam of oak. I didn't need much wood for the small project I'm doing (A bastardized version of
a cornett), and the only lengths of maple they had were 8 feet long. Well, I knew oak was a hardwood, and I knew I didn't want to bother anyone to cut one of the maple ones in half (and that I couldn't transport anything 8 feet long in my car), so what could possibly go wrong???
So I get home, cut the 4 feet down to 2 feet, mark it all up so that when I start drawing the bore design I'll be able to align it, look up the physics of standing wave propagation in a conical tube to refresh myself on the notational properties. You know, all the usual stuff when you're making a weird brass/woodwind combination. I even bought a trumpet mouthpiece, and started practicing what is surely going to be an impossible hurdle of vibrating my lips correctly.
I do everything short of looking up instrument builders' opinions of working with oak ... which are nearly non-existent. Because oak is a splintery wood to work with, and hard to finish because of its very open pores. :|
My time to do this simple search, the last few minutes before calling it a day having already done this work.
:|Should have just bought pine. Or the maple. But honestly, pine would be a better learning wood anyway from what I've been reading. I'm going to keep working on this one, but I'm not going to bother with tone holes yet. Let's see how well I can put together something where the only thing I have to worry about is getting a single note produced correctly. I'm only out $6 for the wood anyway, win or lose, the most expensive thing going into this is that trumpet mouthpiece -- which I can easily reuse for my next attempt.
Still sad because if I had been thinking I would have googled this information before I had taken the sticker off and cut it in two.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9481106 times)