Clarinet Constructing: Barrels, Part 3
Another week passes, more barrels have been printed, and more frustration ensues.
After fixing the measurements on my SolidWorks design, I 3D printed yet another two barrels. This time, I made sure to make the diameters of the holes just a hair smaller than the diameter of the parts that would go in them, to make sure I didn’t end up with barrels that were too large.
After getting those barrels and filing down each hole for a few hours, I managed to produce my first fully functioning clarinet barrel! Surprisingly, it was playable too!
Was it better than the barrel I modeled it after? Not in the slightest, but now we have a functioning prototype that we can start tampering with to get some real improvements.
The sound of the rectangular barrel was less clear than that of the model barrel. Also, there were multitudes of tuning issues, with several notes playing quite flat. This likely means that the center hole is either too large, or isn’t shaped properly.
With this said, it still played quite well, and with some changes this barrel could arguably end up being better than the barrel it was modeled after.
One important note about this rectangular barrel–it’s incredibly sharp. Now I don’t mean that it plays incredibly sharp, but that it has incredibly sharp corners that probably will need to be significantly filed down.
I’ve learned a few things about what variables we have control over in this experiment; we’re limited to only PLA plastic filament, as that’s the only type of plastic our 3D printer can use. We’re also quite limited in mass, as it’s 5 cents per gram, and I am a broken college student. Since we’re limited in mass, we’re forced to use a 20% infill, which means that the solid parts of our 3D model are actually 80% hollow in reality, which lowers the mass even further.
While we are limited in what variables we have control over, we can control the size and shape of the hole, which should give us more than enough to work with in terms of optimizing the performance of these barrels.
Next week, I’ll have a few side-by-side playing tests with this barrel and my model barrel. I’ll also try to use a spectrum analyzer app on my phone to show you how each barrel accentuates different harmonics, and how that plays into getting a different timbre for each barrel. I’ll also try to upload the CAD design file onto here, so anyone who’s interested can print a barrel for themselves, or even try tinkering with these parts themselves!
