owl project ::

So besides the constant drilling, sanding, sawing and miserable country music (my pick again then) the most fascinating/worrying sounds heard in the studio come from Simon's corner of the room.

After helping assemble some circuit boards, Simon decided he'd had enough of us and went on holiday for a couple of weeks, leaving me a list of cables that needed preparing for the Salinity Sampler Sequencer. 

Now then. The Salinity Sampler Sequencer is an instrument that uses the salt levels of river water to generate sound. The water (taken from the River Tyne in this instance) will be drawn at regular intervals and pumped through glass jars. A wooden mechanism then dips a series of electrodes into the jars and creates a series of sounds. The pitch of the sounds will be modified depending on the salinity levels of the water. 

Once the Flow wheel is finished, the lovely people of Newcastle will be able to play around with the sounds by changing the length of the notes.

Ok folks, I've been slacking with posting duties so here comes a bombarding of wood based wizardry which I fully understand the mechanics of and can therefore confidently relay to anyone interested*.

*not necessarily true.

This set of images show the innards of a highly complex section of the machine Tony has named the Turbidatron. I'm sure it'll be made clear why it's been called this, or maybe there's little more to it than he watched Transformers the night before he came in to the studio, but anyway.

I was shown how to use the CNC, a woodcutting machine rigged up to a computer which allows you to plot measurements and cut the wood to your exact design. It's a great tool for quickly making lots of the same pieces, which can then be pieced into bigger designs, in this case the huge cog I'm holding in the last photo.

Once assembled, I was filling any splits or cracks in the wood and treating them with teak oil.

So in loose terms, The Turbidatron is a mechanical sampler. For the purpose of the Flow mill it'll be sampling river water to generate sounds, which for now takes us into the electronic side of things. Take a deep breath...

The crank prototype was good but had some flex and 
wobble and was made  from mahogany and a found 
broomstick. It has threaded bar screwed to the end disks
to mount the bearings on.

 The final crank is made around 25mm oak dowel shaft and has oak disks.
The dowel pegs push through the sides of the disk and fix tight the shaft,
they are doubled up in this one and make it super strong without glue or
screws. A 25mm bore bearing fits snugly on the shaft.

The disks are first CNC cut, then hand drilled in an accurate drilling jig to
make sure the multiple holes for the dowels meet up – As our drill drills at
a slight angle this is actually advantageous, as the inaccuracy means that
the pegs fit very tightly in the hole.


To take this to pieces all that is needed is a few taps with a small hammer to
remove the dowel pegs.

The disks are the slid into place on the 3 dowel shafts. Once the spacing is
right the holes are re-drilled so this time making holed in the shaft for the
dowel pegs, after the pegs are tapped in, the excesses dowel is removed
using a Japanese saw leaving the 3 shafts.


The piston crank in its final form!

This week we started to assemble the turbidity sensor. This is the
transparent tube that will hold water being extracted from the river.
A laser will project through the tube. Here you can see the wooden
frame assembled to hold the tube in place. 


The metal fittings also arrived this week. They connect everything
together and move water around the device. They look fantastic
with the oak!