"Hello, Jim.
I am delighted to report a very successful end to my P3 construction project. I was blown away by the awesome sound it makes.
I made the bars out of padauk and the frame of cherry with a "rosewood" stain.
You may notice that I had to change the diameters of the resonators for octaves 4 and 5. The reason for this is that no matter what wall thickness you get, there is still only one dimension for the endcaps for a given diameter. That is to say if you get 2" thin-walled pipe it still has to use the same endcap which creates a spacing problem. So the diameter of the end caps prevented them from hanging properly. I first attempted to resolve the problem by sanding the edges of the endcaps so they would fit side-by-side. However this resulted in destroying the quality of the resonator. I switched to 40mm (1-1/2")pipes for octave 4 and 1-1/4" pipe for octave 5. This resulted in a clean installation and also excellent sound from the resonators.
Thanks for leading the way in marimba building, Jim! Take care!
George"
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