Cutting the pipes - trouble shooting

The trickiest part of the build was cutting all the pipes to length.  We decided on 8 notes, a c-major scale. There are formulas and estimates for pipe lengths online, but it turns out that the tuning is highly variable with humidity, altitude, and pipe construction.  Using a tuner on your phone/ ipad is very helpful.

 Adding the u-bend to the pipes definitely changed the length of the pipe needed.   We made sure to cement the u-bend on first so that there wouldn't be any change in the tone if the pipe wiggled/ moved.  To cement the PVC pipe to the u-bend (curved portion), follow the directions on the Oatey cement bottle.  It sets up really fast.

The biggest hint here is to start long and cut more as needed.

We used a machine saw that could cut through PVC and metal.  It took 3 hours of trial and error to cut all the pipes and the PVC.

The PVC pipe tuning was very easy to do.  Remember, you need to bring a flip flop and hit the open pipe to create the tone.  The tuning could be very fine-tuned just using a tuning app on your device of choice. 

 The PVC pipe is also very easy to cut, so we could do multiple small cuts without using up too much time.  Having a kid with perfect pitch to help tune was also VERY helpful.

The metal pipes were VERY tricky, because there are so many overtones in the metal.  Placing them on a table or the ground produced a very tinny sound that was a consistent tone at any length.  This was extremely frustrating.   Finally, we drilled a hole and suspended the pipes.  Hitting them with a rubber mallet in the center of the pipe created the best tone, but tuning was still tricky due to all the overtones.  Every time we needed to test the pipe, we had to hang it up and hit is before returning it to the saw.  Cutting through the saw was also very slow, so we couldn't make as many fine adjustments and the tuning wasn't perfect.  We finally decided the kids wouldn't really care as long as you could tell the tones were going up and you could hear the approximate tune.  A few notes ended up sharp or flat.  Oh well.

  

Here are our final measurements in inches:

PVC Pipe (not including Ubend) and note, a couple inches of this fits inside the u-bend, cemented:

C - 89 1/2

D - 78

E - 69

F - 63 3/4

G - 55

A - 48

B - 41

C- 37 1/2

Metal pipes:

C-53

D-50

E- 47 1/2

F- 45 1/2

G - 43

A- 40 3/8

B - 38 1/2

C- 37 3/16