The Philstick

I’m going to call it the Philstick simply ’cause I drew inspiration from the instrument most often used by Mr Phil Dadson. It’s not a direct copy but the essentials are the same.


I started out with a drum head and got a cast aluminium dish, that I cut the bottom off of, that fitted the rim and then cut out some 10mm perspex, from a stereo cabinet door, to make the rim holder. It’s stayed like this for a month or two on the bench and was going to be used atop a 150mm tube with a diaphrapm made from plywood and rubber in it that was going to be a african talking drum type thingy. The tube and diaphrapm are like a big version of the sliding whistle in that the air chamber volume can be changed and so changes the resonant pitch of an air chamber… actually I think the african talking drum has drum head tightness that changes and I’m doing something like the african tongue drum which has a valve of sorts in the drum body to change the air volume inside the drum.

So what detered my from continuing with the drum was the 12 bent and threaded rods needed to make the tensioning rods.
Phil, though, had turned up last week with his fav instrument with an ingenious mod to effect pitch and that set me off on other ways to effect pitch and therefore into using this drum mechanism for my version of his thing.
First thing I had to do was transfer the 12 holes in the perspex down into the aluminium and with the minimum of jigs and my trusty drill press this was achieved with enough tolerance to do the job at hand. l kinda fancy myself as an engineer of sorts but thats really quite loose as the magnitudes for error in my work are such that I couldn’t really be even in the ball park of modern engineering practice… maybe middle ages armour making is close enough but decidedly before clockmakers of the early enlightenment. A blacksmith with a few motors!
Anyways I got the holes drilled in alignment and was able to pass 5mm bright steel rod through them all with a minimum of hammering. Then came out one of my prized possesions which is a Japanese tap and die set which cost me several hundred dollars when it meant bugger all, which is usually very soon after selling an artwork and when I should be considering making it all last for as long as possible, but then again, the only reason I have such a good workshop now is because when I should be conservative I’m always tending towards idealistic.

Up to now I’ve tapped 8 of the threads and hopefully in the next few days I’ll rip it all apart and finish it properly.

Not in logical sequence, by way of building steps, but next up is the body that makes the drumhead have a resonant chamber and allows the “neck” to have something to attach to. This is a topend of an ol’ tellus vacuum cleaner I go from Kieran up in Paparoa when I was helping him with some building earlier in the year. Lovely shape and right for the job as well as having a nice round hole in the side to mount electrics alike a small electret mc with a preamp and knob to spin for signal waveform reduction. You can also kind see the little tiny 4mm and 5mm allen head bolts I used, in conjunction with the Nippon thread cutters, to attach body to head. To the right is the attachment of body to neck which may seem somewhat under strength but it’s really more than adequate for the directions of tension.

Actually heres a photo of that connection and some inkling of what the neck it built of. I had some lengths of machine planed macrocarpa that I picked up years ago out in Patamahoe at the good old fashioned timber mill there (where the workshops always have big ol’ circular steel blades along the walls either just sharpened or waiting for sharpening, you know, we’re talking 1.2metres round for cutting slabs offa trees… I love that kinda stuff) and it’s 12mm thin… or thick. So I cut out two opposing lengths of each side of the neck then glued them together so the orietantion of each length would have the opposing grain orientation in the other. About 50% stronger than two bits cut side by side (less waste but less strength too). Then I had some fibreglass sheeting, used for roofing, and cut two lengths and epoxied (araldite) them to the inner face to create even more rigidity combined with springiness… somewhat like archery bow building I suppose. If the fibreglass where laminated between the two macrocarpa lengths then it would be altogether stronger but altogether more resistant to bending in the direction I wanted it to.

The attachment to the body relies on the tension in the string to keep it upright and may seem somewhat weak when we look at guitar necks but because the string is centralised then the perpendicular tension that guitars have to be resistant to is not encountered.

This is my favourite part and simply because I had no idea, when I thought it up, about how useful it’d become. It was an old dawer front before I cut it out then decided to start tarting it up with very sharp carbon steel. Actually the steel wasn’t so sharp when I started, as it’s been a while since I done any carving, but once one starts it becomes imperitive to hone up the cutting edges as one gets more into finding the lines of least resistance. It’s a New Zealand timber and I have no idea what it is but it’s quite hard but almost creamy in consistance once the blades get sharper and comes out very nice… must find out what it is because I do like it. Nearest exotic would be teak in it’s workability so maybe whatever our boat builders use for decks and fittings… that’d be it… maybe.
Anways I kinda figured something that would put the machine head in almost the same line as the rod used to attach it to the neck after figuring that those through rods were the easiest way to connect to the neck lengths and it just so happens that not being in the same axis, the through rods and the machine head pinion mean I’ve made a whammy bar!You can see the little knob of wood at the right hand end of the “headstock” and that was going to be used to drill a hole through and have a “nut” for the string and also fix the “headstock” again to the neck “struts”. But when I affixed the through rods and strung it up I realised I’d created an ability to stretch the string beyond that which I already hoped would happen, and didn’t work actually ( it was going to happen by pulling together the neck struts towards the body where they bow outwards but it actually needs a cross strut between each strut so the point between bowing outwards, which when brought together will lengthen the string, and the bowing inwards part, towards the top which will lower the string length when brought together, so that each bow set can act independantly. The middle strut will allow the see-saw to work) but the whammy does and it opens up a whole bunch of possiblities to change frequency.

You can have the new struts btween your hands spread and squeeze to lower the frequency but at the same time use the back of your fingers to push the whammy bar away and increase the pitch by tightening the string and quite easily get a vibrato effect going on. It’s a little neanderthal at the mo’ but some thought and a few bits of slippery should make it more decisive in action… back to the shed!

So there we go, the Philstick, and I really do think I’m going to have a whole bunch of fun with this set of new possibilities. I really must go back to the piano shop and buy some lengths of music wire ’cause bass strings just aren’t long enough anymore for what I want to do. Oh, yeah, it’s got a high G bass string in it because even though I’m kinda taking a whole chapter outta Phil’s book I wan’t to be sonically in different territory and he uses something like an .015″ plain string whereas I’m wound up and at about .050″ ( just checked…040″)