Music Box

The case is made of solid maple, with beautiful maple burl veneer inset on the top and base. They don’t call it “hard rock” maple for nothing - it took weeks to cut out all that ivy scrollwork.

There is a separate birch ply frame within, that holds all the ‘machinery’.

I wish I’d had a camera as I was building this - it’s hard to show the internal works with photographs, but you can see the “clockworks” and the music mechanicals through the ivy.

The gear train is basically a copy of my Gravity clock, including the wooden spring barrel (wound by the crank on the side). The drum is common with the “centre wheel”, and the final arbor drives a fly-fan governor.

The top opens up to watch it play. The pull-knob at the bottom starts it. As the drum turns, the pins on the drum lift hammers that strike tuned bells made of aluminum bar. The drum turns once in a minute, and stops. There is a “repeat” lever that will hold the stop lever up, and it will play continuously.

There’s even a classical music box “tunesheet” on the inside of the lid.

It plays two different tunes - “Winter” and “Way Down” by Tori Amos. The lever on top is moved to shift the drum side-to-side to select which tune plays. There was only room for 17 notes, so I had to re-write the songs from their original 88 notes.

The back is open. It’s actually more interesting to watch it play from the rear - you can better see the “works” working. The drum is made of a 4” carpet roll (very heavy-duty cardboard), covered with maple veneer. There are over 550 small brass pins, each in its ‘exact’ place, corresponding to a given note at a specific time.

Click on this picture to hear a recording of the Music Box. (It will open in your browser’s mp3 player. Or, right-click, “Save Target As”… 319KB) This was recorded on my desktop with the computer microphone, and picked up more gear noise than you can hear normally. the Music Box

I love machinery, woodworking, and music. It’s only natural that I combined all of these passions into one project. Inspired by the “chime section” one of Mark Frank’s beautiful clocks, this took over a year to design and build. It is one of my favorite pieces.