The Tonecussion: A Printable Musical Instrument
Of all the strange things in the world to be inspired by, a tongue drum up for sale on one of the local music supply sites was not what I expected. And yet, that's exactly what happened.
To the right, you will see the original object posted to the Facebook sales community. It's a lovely wood texture percussion instrument, clearly finally polished and well cared for. Or at least cared for. Of particular note (pardon the pun) or the wooden tongs which extend into the middle of the top surface, ready to be struck with a padded mallet at any moment in order to be encouraged to scream. At least it should give out a pleasant, woody tone.
Not pictured here is the side view which made it clear that the whole thing is a box with possibly a fitted or glued lid of possibly dissimilar wood type. There's also a resonator hole to let the noisy bits out. Without that, the overall sound would be negatively affected.
This isn't actually the original photo I started with; the original photo was taken at a very slight angle, which provided certain difficulties. A quick trip through Photoshop and a use of the Mesh Warp tool let me straighten out the corners into a perfect rectangle for the next step.
When you are trying to reproduce a thing in Fusion 360 and you know that it is effectively a rectangular prism, making sure the corners are square before you start working from a canvas and generating sketches is probably a good idea. One of the really extremely useful features of Fusion is the fact that you can import an image onto a canvas and then scale that image so that measurements taken off of it will be useful.
In this case, my thought was to model something that might be eventually printed on a Monoprice Mini, which necessitated that the long axis is shorter than 120 mm. I decided to be a little circumspect and go for a total length of 110 mm, just in case.
What came next was largely just the result of sketching out what was there on the screen.
The fiddly bit is always figuring out what measurements should be, and when working from a sketch my technique generally involves putting down some lines, dragging them into what looks roughly correct, and then putting on measurements which round up or down to something sensible. Notice that several measurements on the sketch are marked with "fx:"; this represents that they are actually calculated values – generally here either a duplicate of another measurement or a calculated portion.
I use this a lot to create measurements which are X/3 or X/5, where X is some already extant length because it's much easier than splitting a line into three or five segments which are defined to be of equal length and working off their endpoints. A fine side effect is that should one of the dimensions here change, everything else just falls into place without direct editing.
What followed was some fairly straightforward extrusion, but done in two parts in order to create a lid and a body.
The lid was originally extruded as just a single slab, and then a simple sketch placed on its underside to define the outer edges of the lid which were then extruded and joined with the original body.
The bottom was extruded down from the original outline of the lid and then had the lip extruded downward as a cut, removing material so that the lid could sit over the interior of the solid form. Conceptually, there was to be no actual gap between the bottom of the lid and the body, but after a fortuitous mistake and some tinkering, I decided I actually liked the effect and left it.
The resonator hole was just the sketch stuck on the end of the box with a circle on it offset from the center of the face and then extruded through the wall to make a hole.
It's only after you have the basic shapes of a design complete that you go in and begin applying chamfers and radii. Starting that process too early will make it an absolute pain in the ass for you to make parts which connect and overlap in reasonable ways. It's also a really common error for me to make because I like to "start making things pretty" before their actually done.
Be smart. Don't be like me.
I managed to hold off pretty effectively this time and am rather happy with the results. I went with a heavy radius on the interior of the resonating cavity, in part because I wanted it to be strong enough to be carried around and manhandled. The whole underwent some juggling but because having a radius and a chamfer or two radii interact often means that Fusion won't be able to calculate the results. Fillets on the holes in the top and chamfers along the slots gave it a bit of mixed texture that I was really fond of.
Don't be afraid to heavily use and abuse the section view functionality when you are tinkering with getting multiple parts to overlap and function together. You'll appreciate it especially when you are working on putting chamfers, fillets, and radii on the interior of a hollow volume.
This was the result when I through a bit of a 3D cherrywood texture on the box and did a little rendering.
Of course, practically this was never going to be done in cherrywood. (Unless someone really wants the design and has some means of doing wood CAM, in which case – get in touch!) More believably, there needed to be a few renders in relatively sedate red plastic.
Tonecuss
by SquidLord
on Sketchfab
 |
| The tongue drum, originale |
Not pictured here is the side view which made it clear that the whole thing is a box with possibly a fitted or glued lid of possibly dissimilar wood type. There's also a resonator hole to let the noisy bits out. Without that, the overall sound would be negatively affected.
This isn't actually the original photo I started with; the original photo was taken at a very slight angle, which provided certain difficulties. A quick trip through Photoshop and a use of the Mesh Warp tool let me straighten out the corners into a perfect rectangle for the next step.
In this case, my thought was to model something that might be eventually printed on a Monoprice Mini, which necessitated that the long axis is shorter than 120 mm. I decided to be a little circumspect and go for a total length of 110 mm, just in case.
What came next was largely just the result of sketching out what was there on the screen.
I use this a lot to create measurements which are X/3 or X/5, where X is some already extant length because it's much easier than splitting a line into three or five segments which are defined to be of equal length and working off their endpoints. A fine side effect is that should one of the dimensions here change, everything else just falls into place without direct editing.
What followed was some fairly straightforward extrusion, but done in two parts in order to create a lid and a body.
The bottom was extruded down from the original outline of the lid and then had the lip extruded downward as a cut, removing material so that the lid could sit over the interior of the solid form. Conceptually, there was to be no actual gap between the bottom of the lid and the body, but after a fortuitous mistake and some tinkering, I decided I actually liked the effect and left it.
The resonator hole was just the sketch stuck on the end of the box with a circle on it offset from the center of the face and then extruded through the wall to make a hole.
It's only after you have the basic shapes of a design complete that you go in and begin applying chamfers and radii. Starting that process too early will make it an absolute pain in the ass for you to make parts which connect and overlap in reasonable ways. It's also a really common error for me to make because I like to "start making things pretty" before their actually done.
Be smart. Don't be like me.
I managed to hold off pretty effectively this time and am rather happy with the results. I went with a heavy radius on the interior of the resonating cavity, in part because I wanted it to be strong enough to be carried around and manhandled. The whole underwent some juggling but because having a radius and a chamfer or two radii interact often means that Fusion won't be able to calculate the results. Fillets on the holes in the top and chamfers along the slots gave it a bit of mixed texture that I was really fond of.
Don't be afraid to heavily use and abuse the section view functionality when you are tinkering with getting multiple parts to overlap and function together. You'll appreciate it especially when you are working on putting chamfers, fillets, and radii on the interior of a hollow volume.
This was the result when I through a bit of a 3D cherrywood texture on the box and did a little rendering.
by SquidLord
on Sketchfab
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