In an earlier post I tuned the chimes. In this post, I find one way not to make a frame for those chimes.

I created the frame for the glockenspiel, with a square frame on the outside so that I could mark the inner part of the frame with 1″ lines, one per chime.

I then aligned each chime in turn with the lines and with the centerline of the frame – the place where the solenoid will strike the chime.

I then drilled a pair of shallow marker holes for each aligned pipe. I could have instead marked the holes by slipping a thin pencil through the chime holes – but I didn’t have such a pencil, so the handy hand drill sufficed.

I then drilled smaller holes centered in the marker holes, and glued a short dowel in each hole.

Then I made the big mistake: I unscrewed the frame so that I could glue it back together – replacing the screws with glue.

Although I was careful to glue the frame pieces along marker lines I’d made when it had been screwed together, the long sides of the frame slipped enough that the dowels no longer aligned with the holes in the chimes.

You can see in the photo below that, for example, the “D” chime hole is nearly 1/4″ away from the peg above it, that it should have been able to rest on. This offset is true for almost all the chimes, indicating that the long parts of the frame shifted between the time I drilled the dowel holes and the time I tried to drop the chimes onto the dowels in those holes.

So, my plan now is to make another frame, and to glue the frame together before I mark and drill the dowel holes (duh) that the chimes will fit over. If at first you don’t succeed, find the root cause of the problem and correct it 🙂

My next post has the details of the working frame for the chimes.