Background
If there's one thing I've learned from ten years of playing drums, it's that tuning drums is hard. Tuning any instrument is hard, but a drum adds a challenge: you need to bring each lug up in small, incremental amounts, following a complex pattern around the drum so you don't overtighten between two lugs and warp the head. Only after doing that three or four times to reach the desired pitch range can the actual tuning begin. The whole process can take 10 to 20 minutes.
Multiply that by the number of drums on your kit (anywhere from 2 to 30+ if you're Neil Peart) and that's how you end up with a tuned drum kit.
Project goal
Design a tool that can tune all the lugs on a drum head at the same time, to cut the time (and headache) it takes to tune a drum.
To be continued
Work in progress. This one is still in the design phase, so there are no results to show yet. I'll add CAD, prototypes and test data here as I build it.
Skills used
- CAD (SolidWorks)
- Mechanical design
- 3D printing
- Iterative design