When the girls were little, maybe even before Lillian was born, we came by some great little percussion toys for the girls. I think someone gave 'em to us. Please forgive me if you are the one; I can't remember. Maybe Betty Franklin or Debi Lewis? The kids and I had a great time banging on the drum, shaking the maracas, or tapping out the scale on the bells that made a circular metallophone. We specially liked to twirl the bells and let the mallet bounce through the scale.
When the girls had outgrown them I displayed the colorful plastic and metal and wooden instruments on a high shelf on that whole wall of shelves in our bedroom. I thought, one of these days I may have some grandkids and I'll bet they'd enjoy these. Sheila threatened to donate them several times, but I wanted to keep them.
When Clementine was born in 2018 I was ready to reclaim them, clean then up, and get them out to California. BUT when I took them down I discovered time had not been kind. Three decades had degraded the plastic parts and some of them all but disintegrated when I started handling them. Especially the metallophone that was my favorite. The metal bells arranged in Roy G Biv order and creating an eight note scale were a bit scratched and pocked from enthusiastic playing, but were otherwise fine. The plastic wheel to which they were attached was just crumbled to coarse sand. The blue plastic base seemed okay, though the built-in ball bearings on which it turned, didn't turn so well.
So I thought, "I'll cut wooden disk to replace the wheel". But "round tuits" are difficult to come by these days.
Then I was at one of Nedra Manners' estate sales, and there in a kitchen pantry was the base of one of those glass-domed cheese trays, missing its glass dome. Only the inch-thick wooden disk that the dome had sat on remained. Nedra may have charged me a buck for it, or maybe fifty cents.
I spent a while with a pencil and drawing compass establishing the center and marking eight equally spaced marks around the circumference. The bells would fit the old cheese tray base well. But the small plastic base would be too small now, and besides the ball bearing seemed iffy at best. So I started looking around for a more proportional and substantial base.
A while back I had some stomach issues and Dr. Molina suggested I raise the head end of our bed. So we bought some plastic bed raisers and used just two of 'em and have been sleeping at a slant ever since. Well, almost. One night we were startled when the plastic gave way and we experienced a small earthquake, errr, bedquake. So we were in the market for more sturdy bed raisers. Sheila found a set of four attractive wooden ones. When I needed a new base for the metallophone bells, she remembered the bed raisers and suggest one of our spares might do the trick. It is perfect! A trip to Ace Hardware garnered a four-inch lazy-susan bearing to comnect the cheese tray to the bed raiser and allow for spinning.
Usually when installing a lazy-susan you drill a large hole in the bottom plate to access the screws to attach the top plate, but in this case my bottom plate was four or five inches thick so I drilled large holes (four holes so it would be symmetrical) in the cheese tray instead. Then sanded (and sanded and sanded) off the old dark surface and rounded off the edges of the holes and the disk itself. I had a wooden peg in the workshop which I attached to the center of the disk as a handle for twirling and carrying. I found some reddish brown stain in the shed and applied that.
A little lemon oil shined it up. I attached the lazy-susan hardware, and finally attached the eight bells.
Voila. It will serve the purpose well, and looks right good, to my untrained eyes. There is something so satisfying and rewarding to fashion something in wood, even something so simple and small, with your own hands. I repent selling my Shopsmith to Cotton Franklin 35 years ago -- I would have turned a base for it on the lathe. (Smile.) I am not so sure my little project will look quite so perfect to some of my more expert woodworking friends like Bob Harris or Jeff Kirk or Mike Burton, or my grandkids' Dad for that matter. But doggone it, I like it. I hope Clem and Ruth will.
And I hope they use the mallets responsibly.
The project is now in the mail and scheduled to arrive in Vista, California the day before Santa gets there. I made the deadline, barely. Whadya think?
Watch me play you a tune on it here... what a talented guy!
Later Note: December 29, 2020
Brannon sent us this video of the girls playing with their new metalophone. They seemed to like it. Clementine's favorite color is purple and so she limits her playing mostly to the purple bell. Ruth is still teething and so more often gums the mallet rather than striking the bells with it.
