How to Make a Single Octave Xylophone

Made for a class project, this Instructable will tell you step by step the process we used to make this xylophone. It spans one octave and hits all the notes in a scale. Including the tuning, building, sanding, painting process, it took about 7 hours to make.

Step 1 Setting up the keys

This is just what we used and this isn't exactly what it ended up  being, but each key was 2 inches wide, and one inch thick, with varying lengths...

General Lengths for Keys:
        C (low):    14 inches
        D:    13.5 inches
        E:    13 inches
        F:    12.5 inches
        G:    12 inches
        A:    11.5 inches
        B:    11 inches
        C (high):    10.5 inches

This is what we started out with, in hopes that it would already be tuned. However, this was not the case, so we had to go on to tune each and every key to an appropriate scale.

The types of wood were a bit tricky to sort out, but we found a balance of good sound and well priced wood was to use Pine. The amount of wood we bought (and we had extra) was about $14. You could go for some more expensive Rosewood, but this works just fine for us.

Comments

[masterbuilder]

This was very helpful. It has great tone and sounds just like the ones I play in band. All my friends and my music teacher think I'm a genius!