4 Letters
Write 4 handwritten letters using paper and ink.
Homemade Piano
Make your very own homemade piano.
Even though I spend all day every day doing nothing but typing on a computer, I still feel that there’s a place in the world for hand written letters. There’s just something so exciting about checking the mail and seeing a real person’s handwriting on there! I mean, it must be something wonderful if a real person wrote it, and not a machine!
So I decided to repay the favor for all of the times in the last several years I’ve received my own real live letter by writing 4 letters, by hand, to 4 different people. I really didn’t have any idea who they would go to, but I figured I’d find somebody naturally as the year progressed.
And sure enough, opportunities presented themselves without me even having to go look for them! My first letter I sent to my son as he was hiking away dressed as a pioneer on our church’s 2-day youth hike in remembrance of all the trials the early pioneers had to go through when our church was still young.
My second letter I sent to a friend from my congregation. He is currently out serving as a missionary for our church, and his father was in a terrible car accident. So several of us from the congregation got together and made sure someone was writing him encouraging letters every single week. And just so I’m not leaving any of you hanging, his father has recovered from his injuries, and has now taken back the role of writing letters to his son.
My third letter was not actually a single letter. It was a series of postcards. I have a couple of friends in Italy, Marco and Kristina, and I decided it would be a fun idea to pick up a postcard from every single place we visited on our Great Western Adventure. All together, I believe it was about 20 or 25 postcards, and I wrote a small blurb about what each place was like on them.
My final letter was to my middle son, who will be turning 12 next year, which is a pretty important age for boys in our church. It’s the age that he’ll receive the priesthood, and start helping out with some of the responsibilities for keeping up the church. So I wrote him a note telling him how proud I am of his life and the choices he’s made.
Next up, the homemade piano.
Oh, that piano…
During the year, there were 2 projects that ended up being so much bigger than I anticipated them being. This is the first one.
I really did intend to actually make a real live homemade piano, but it took me all of about 1 hour to realize there was no way I was going to be able to come up with a mechanic to actually hit a string hard enough to make noise. So plucking it was. And for those of you who may be in the know have already surmised, an instrument that makes noise by hitting a key that plucks a string is called a harpsichord.
So I made a harpsichord.
First, I needed to figure out what material I could acquire easily and cheap. First, I tried the metal wire you can buy by the foot at Home Depot, but quickly realized that you have to get that scary tight before it'll make noise. Then, while scouring around our basement, I saw some extra line we had for our weed whacker. Turns out, you don't have to get it that tight before it makes a very pleasant sound when plucked.
Now I just needed to solve 2 problems with this line: 1) How do I keep it taut? And 2) It's obviouly going to regularly go out of tune, so how do I make it easily tunable tunible easy to tune? Well, another trip to Home Depot solved that one for me. I found some little things called screw eyes. These little puppies are threaded like screws, but have big rings at the top . Good for tying the end of a line to, and very easy to adjust by hand!
After my first try, I realized that a single screw eye couldn't keep the line in its proper place alone, so each note would have to have two little screw eyed buddies on each end: one to keep it in place, and one to hold the tension.
Next up, how on earth was I going to build something that could actually pluck a string? This one I really strugged with for days. It wasn't until I was opening a bag of hamburger buns when I saw the little plastic tab used to keep the bag sealed. I bent it with my fingernail and released and sure enough, it plucked and went right back into place! So I collected those tabs for about 3 months and cut them into tiny little rectangles.
What to put them in was also tricky, but fortunately I was able to steal a lot of this section off of an actual harpsichord. I used paint sticks that fit into (mostly) perfectly aligned slots between two 2x4s. I then glued my tabs into grooves I cut near the top. Now, when pressed on the bottom, the stick will go (mostly) straight up and pluck anything that gets in its way.
Now I was working my way to the mechanics. In order to ensure that a plucked string wouldn't play forever, I glued a piece of wood to the top of each paint stick and glued felt onto the bottom of it. This would dampen the string whenever the note was put back at rest.
And the part I am most proud of was how I got the paint sticks to move. Remember, this had to be a harpsichord, so you had to actually push on a 'key', and that, in turn, causes a string to be plucked. So I mounted a small length of wood (leftover molding we had downstairs) between the two ends underneath the main section. Before securing the second side, I slid on 8 small lengths of PVC pipe that fit almost perfectly around the molding. Each section of pipe had already been glued to what would eventually become the 'key' that you press down on to play the note. So once they were all on, all I had to do was screw the back of the key to the bottom of the paint stick. Now it's a see saw, push down on the 1x2, and the paint stick goes up and plucks the weed whacker string!
I had so much fun making this harpsichord I could hardly stand it. And the fact that I started it in June and finished it on December 31st doesn't deter me at all from trying something like this in the future.
So enjoy this video I made of me playing my talent show song for our annual Olsen Christmas talent show.