The Mini-Pelodaiko Project

 

The Barrel

My first obstacle, as the old wooden barrels are nowadays more and more replaced by ones made in other materials like for example plastic/PVC was finding one in a size I could handle easily this first time, dough one advantage we, as (apprentice) “ barrel” drum builders have is that the state of the barrel (for example, if its leaky or not) is not that important as long as the wood of the staves is in fairly good condition. For me, almost a year later at the beginning of autumn 2003 something that until then was only a vague plan in the back of my mind became a reality when call it beginners luck, I found a small wine barrel in a waste container at work. In my eyes, it had the Ideal size for a first time drum building project.

 
This is how the barrel looked like after a first cleaning to get the cob webs and dirt off…
 

Dimensions :
Height :14.5 inch – 37cm
Belly Wide : 35.2 inch – 89cm
Finished Head Size (playing area) : 9 inch – 23cm
 

Tip: The Big barrels are easier to find,
 a good place to start looking might be your local garden center...
If they don't have e'm in stock, its worth it to ask if they can't order you one...

 

 Taking it apart and back again
 I took it home with me and it stood in my practice room (my attic) for almost a year.  Don’t know why I hesitated so long to start (talked about it enough, making plans how I would do it) but I did… Anyway, time slipped by until I was ready to go ahead and when I did at last, I started with de-assembling the barrel. First I removed the hoops and then used a light weight wooden round hammer to slowly tap the staves loose from the top and bottom lid. I also took care to number each of the staves so I would know the order to put them back after I cleaned them.

 

 

For this cleaning job, I looked around for an easy way and found these finishing wheels in a local hardware store, I bought me grade 60, 100 & 150. They worked like a charm and not for long I had the staves cleaned up. 
 Tip: Don’t sand the sides of the staves; they are at a very precise angle towards one another…
I learned this the hard way when I reassembled the barrel…

So now, I was ready to reassemble the barrel, if you think easy done… think differently as its not, not if you never seen how a barrel was made anyway… I tried putting one head hoop on the floor and setting the staves in the ring while desperately trying to hold them together… Hopeless, I tried with sticking them together with painter's tape but also to no avail, the staves kept falling over…   This went on for days, me playing my Bodhran while looking at the staves thinking what I could try next, I even tried to make the barrel in a box… Meanwhile I did multiple searches on the internet to find examples of how coopers did this in the olden days and finally found a page with a little movie of a cooper assembling a barrel. (See links below). All I needed to do was to press the first stave against a small piece of wood I slid over the top hoop, press the first stave against it, and then continue further putting up staves one against the other, always keeping the pressure on there… One drawback I encountered was that the barrel had shrunk, this was caused by the staves lying so long apart on the attic table… You can see this in the picture below by how deep the hoops went down if you compare with the picture above (To get them of initially I needed a hammer and chisel).
 

The Barrels inside

It was mid summer of 2005 by now, I know folk… this project is taking me forever <grin>, by then I  had decided not to use the hoops again, and was going to fix the staves permanently into one solid shell using fiberglass mats on the inside of the barrel, a bit expensive but as this was a small barrel I did not need that much. This and the outside finish I planned to apply is also why I did not glue the staves…

   

On a sunny day, I waited until it cooled down a bit late afternoon, secured the barrel on a improvised stand so I could work on it from both sides without it rolling over and applied the polyester… This was straightforward
 

Note : I bought mine in a yacht/boat repair shop near the harbor, ask in the shop for details on how to prepare the mixture…
 

I’ve cut the mats up in pieces I could handle easily and  gave the barrels inside with a small paint roller a coat of the prepared mixture, a bit bigger than the size of the cut mats. Carefully to avoid wrinkles I lay the mat into this and sealed it of with another coat of the varnish. Did this until I covered the whole inside of the barrel. I’ve repeated this whole process four times to get a four layer thick polyester mat inside, I also was careful that no two mats lay equal inside but one always overlapped two or more others…
 

Tip : preferably do this outside when temperature is around 16°C to 19C.
if not possible make sure the room is well ventilated., don’t make more than you can handle in 10 to 15min…
Have a few spare rollers for your paint roller… The ones I used dissolved slowly.
 

 

 
Its around this point the barrel really became a drum in progress for me, when I started work on…

 The Bearing Edge

This is what I had to transform into the bearing edge, as the staves had dried differently some had bended a bit more other shrunk a bit or got taller (straightened out) … again I hesitated to start… Then suddenly one Saturday gave myself  an imaginary kick in the bud and took the barrel, chucked it between my legs took my jigsaw and cut of  the top of the drum so it was approximately straight to the eye, wondering why I thought so long about it (like what could go wrong or “best way to do it…).  Now In retrospect I think maybe this was because as much as I liked building the drum I enjoyed the talks with my friends (Thanks Me Squire for al those Friday evening way past midnight ramblings on J…) After this I used a combination of sliding the drum back and forth with a turning movement over a concrete slab to get the top even and a wood rasp to shape the bearing edge…
 

I found me this “old” beauty to do the Mini’s on,
 its just perfect
  (if only I knew now how my grandfather used that old washing machine’s motor to let a bicycle wheel turn slowly in the wind to dry fish)…
 J
 

All that needed to be done next was to fine shape the edge with the finishing wheels. Keep in mind this is a work of love and a crucial step in the building of your drum so don’t hurry it…The more even you get the bearing edge the better it will translate into the sound of your drum in the end. After that all discrepancies left in the shell, inside and out where treated with a light oak wood fill product, I then took the drilling machine with the sanding wheels again to remove any left polyester stains on the outside and finish the shell completely smooth (Used a grade A60 and then A100)

The Dohl Hooks

I got ordered mine from “JAS” online and I must say that delivery was very quick (took only a few working days). When they arrived and I wanted to place them through my drums side I encountered my first problem. The thread on the brackets was not long enough for the thickness of the staves. I solved this by making a round hole so the bracket went a bit deeper. I did this for esthetic reasons on the outside of the drum and also because the barrel’s inside was to small to do it from that side. 

Its very important that these holes are made as vertical as possible so the brackets are fixed straight. A quality washer was placed underneath the bracket to finish it of (with these you can correct any discrepancies in the angle of the hole). Once those in place,  the brackets where fixed firmly on top.
 

Again trouble came my way… As I made the holes, I made them at a height from the bearing edges I found esthetically pleasing to my idea for a drum this size… Well, a word of advice, don’t let this guide you, but instead take in account the height of the thread on the hooks and the estimated amount the skin will travel down the shell when tensioning and getting played in… (let say a total of 5cm)  In my case see picture above the thread ended to quick. I thought no problem I will just re-cut it a bit higher up the hooks shaft using a tool like this…

 

Well this proved to be easier said than done as I found out the hard way… As the hooks came from “JAS” the thread on it had a UK/Indian size… I’ve looked in every local shop I could think of but was not able to find a thread cutting knife for the tool that exactly fitted the thread on the hooks. So I eventually ended up with “the closest I could get”… The thread knife turned supple over the UK thread so I thought it was OK and bought it. It was not, as I found out later when I’ve put tension on the skins, but I’m running ahead of the story… Not aware of this next problem that would arise, I finished the outside of the drum a last time completely with the finishing wheel (grade 150), whipped it of with a damp cloth to remove any dust and gave it a light oak color finish, when this dried out I also applied three coats of colorless (transparent) “stairway” varnish. The result was a baby bottom smooth drum shell with a beautiful wood grain design to it… The tap hole is left open so the air can escape the drum during playing, It’s also a convenient entry point when you want to mike the drum…  (I plan to enlarge this " Sound Hole" a bit, I'm also thinking about what influence it would have if one constructed a barrel drum with evenly spaced Sound Holes like this all around the belly of the barrel... Something to try out a next time)
 

 

 

Skinning the shell
 

Think I don’t need to say that again this took some time, talks and mails for me to start with… Summer had gone and autumn 2005 was here already. After some searching and asking around, I had acquired two goat skins… One thick grayish one was send to me from New Zealand (Thanks again Peter) and I also was able to buy one big round extremely thin one from N.I. through that same group. The one from New Zealand was to small to cover both heads and the N.I. due to it being so thin, I wanted to save for when I build me my first Bodhran(s). Yup I have plans in that direction to… So there I was… with, but without suitable skins. Again Paul came to the rescue when he offered to send me two pieces of Deer Skin he had left over from building the big pelo’s and once those arrived, I could go ahead again… I soaked the skin in water for a small hour or so, by then they where completely softened and then stretched one of them out as even as I could on the kitchen table and lay the flesh ring on top positioning it as center as I could. At a distance of 2cm of the ring I punched the holes for the two tensioning ropes I needed for this size of drumhead (at location 12-6-3-9 and 2-7-10-4 approximately). The ropes were then inserted and the skin folded over the ring with as much tension put on the ropes as I dared applied to them to avoid ripping the skin.

 I placed the drumhead centre on top of the drum shell and placed the second hoop over it. Inserted the Dohl hooks and turned the bolts on them until the hooks stayed in place and started carefully tensioning the skin… like you would tighten the bolts on the wheel of your car… working diagonally so the tension is spread evenly around (starting at the hook you call 12 ‘o clock, then 6, 10, 4, 2, 7 and so forth, trying to keep the amount of tension equal for each bolt. Did this until the skin was completely evenly stretched over the bearing edge and I had achieved a clear tone. I repeated this for the other side and then let the drum dry for 24 hours.
Then finally, two days later I cut away the excess skin carefully with a Stanley knife to finish off the head.
 

I'll include this practice example I got from Paul, In the picture below the Minipelo gets played with Dohl sticks, The Dugga and the Thilli. The Dhol has one very high pitched skin and one very low pitched skin, If you are right handed the thilli (thin cane) is held in the right hand and hits the high pitched head, the dugga (thick curved cane) is held in the left and hits the low pitched head. The basic pattern is the chaal it's an 8 beat pattern with the thilli hitting all 8 beats and the bass on 1, 6 and 7. you need to shuffle the thilli beat so instead of it being 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 it goes 1 23 45 67 81 23 45 67 8 etc (bass beats shown here in bold).
 

Note : Once the heads have dried, you can loosen the hooks and the head can come off, just like a hat.
 Of course the flesh ring will still be and should remain inside the skin.
This makes it easy to experiment with different types of skin.
 

Finished after all… Well... not really…
 

I still have a few things to deal with in regards to the self inflicted troubles with the Dohl Hooks...See, after this drying out period and the extra tension it brought on the hooks & bolts, I noticed some of the bolts loosened by themselves due to the wrong thread I've cut mentioned earlier. In my local metal workshop I went to they said they could not make me the custom sized hooks I was looking for… (Think that was more a question of working time and expensive wages versus what they could charge me for (only) 12 hooks). An option they presented was to cut of the hook part of the “JAS” hooks (the part without thread)  and weld those onto pieces of M8 continental standard “TisFul-T” as we call thread staves over here… ( don’t ask me why J ). So that’s what I will do…
  

As you can see also the brackets are still a bit to deep for the hooks to be completely straight versus the shell. I have a solution for this to, Once I have the M8 hooks, I’m going to fix a thread joint in the holes and turn the brackets into those… That way by turning them more in or out,  I can adjust each brackets individually as I need them to be compared to the drum shell.
But despite those hiccups after almost two years in the making finally there stood the first Mini-pelodaiko… Think that everybody who ever ventured into something similar knows how I felt... It felt ... well... great. For those who did not... Hope reading this gave you the spark I got from Paul's report on the big bro's of the growing Pelodaiko family...
 

A last advise, play the drum softly for a few days, then its all up to where you live and how much your neighbors and house mate’s will stand for, Have fun now…

Me “home alone” giving the first version of
 “The Mini-Pelodaiko drum V1.0Beta”
 its first real beating

 

 

 What about those Skins :