Just one of those builds

Here I sit with a pair of beautiful drones with nice pewter work on them that may now (unless I can figure a way to rescue the bottom section) be firewood. sigh..

The screw up occurred when I set the pieces to a side after turning to a cylinder and boring. I placed them in a marked rack and left them a week before returning to work on them. After all is said and done I tried to reed them. They would not stay stable and even most of the time would only squeal or at best madly double tone. 4 hours I mucked about with them before trying swapping parts from a properly functional drone only to find....

I'd mixed up the damn parts and have the small bore on the top and the larger bore on the bottom essentially creating an inverse cone! This is fine for recorders but works badly on a very long bass drone. The top I can just bore out, no big deal, but 'tis hard to put wood back on the bottom. I had thought about bunging in a dowel then re-boring, but that just seems such sloppy bad work. So back to the shop, get it right this time. It's re-doing the pewter work that upsets me most.. At least I can salvage the top sections and do not have to redo the flared 4 inch bells.

Stu

Stu wrote:I had thought about bunging in a dowel then re-boring, but that just seems such sloppy bad work.

That is exactly what I would do, and I find nothing bad about it.
If done well, nobody will ever notice...

Whant are the bore diameters?

Yuri wrote:Whant are the bore diameters?

5/16th at bottom, 1/4th on the top section. the original drone with the measurements the other way plays fine.

It's worth for a start just redrilling the top to5/16. You might find that it will work well like that. It will simply give you a straight bore right through.

You could reduce the bore with brass tube. Slip in a couple of bits would reduce the hole size neatly.

Bob

Thanks guys, I'll try those ideas.

Update on that drone. I tried boring out the top so I had a straight pipe through.. just as bad. Then I tried sleeving the bottom section with hobby brass and found if I had as much as 4 inches of it in the drone, the thing worked perfectly.

Now, WHY? A tad of back pressure? Any thoughts?

And thanks for the ideas guys, looks like I have this screwup licked. Will pay more attention in the future.

Stu

Don't worry, Stu.
I have seen a few backwater "mechanics" pulling apart a few cars, and in one case, a tractor, then putting them back together. They never quite knew what to do with the bits that were left over, and didn't seem to go anywhere...

In the end, I did just remake the bottom section of drone with a smaller diameter and bored out the top. Nice sound now.
If anyone is interested here is a video of my latest set of this type. Complete with me muffing up playing it due to my attention being more on my terror of cameras than on demoing the instrument. sigh..

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