The first kalimba

I made my eldest daughter a kalimba for her 9th birthday. Took quite a time and lots of rejects ended in the garbage. The 'keys' were the hardest thing to find. Eventually I settled for the 'tines' of a garden rake painted at the end with enamel.

Three small dowels coloured with alkyd dyes created the tension and worked pretty well as long as they were strong enough resist bending under tension. The key thing is the 'box' - that which acts like a resonating box - the better the box the better the sound. I used thin birch laminate and glued all six sides over a few days. Finished everything off with a numeral '9' beneath the sound hole.

So, I have had kalimbas in mind for a Tapir Caper for as long as I've been doing these projects. The problem has always been to find the necessary parts within reasonable costs. 'Cos it would be silly to raise funds with objects the cost me a fortune to create - right? I have to strike a balance! 

Well just recently I came across 'dollar store' boxes. They come as plain wood boxes, usually hinged, for people to decorate as jewelry boxes and the like. Now, no one store carries 30 of these and certainly not all the same size, so over the last few weeks I have toured all the dollar stores in the city gathering boxes of varying sizes. So, boxes ......check!

The boxes being quite small means that I don't need 'garden rake tines' - they would be far too big. Dollar Stores come to the rescue again  - they sell 'bobby pins' 'hair pins' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_pin) - lots of them. And the big ones are just the right strength, plus they have a plastic coating on one end ..... perfect. Keys/prongs/tines ..... check!

There are 58 days left till April 27th during which I will go through the process of making 30 kalimbas. Then decorating before finally packaging them. As before, I will blog the whole process and invite anyone to comment as they wish. Looking forward to World Tapir Day '13

First prototype