Handpans had been a 'thing' for quite some time before they came across my radar, but, boy, was I taken with them when I first saw/heard one in 2023. If only I could afford to buy one (nup). What about making one, though?
I wanted to chart my DIY journey in case it inspires (or acts as a warning to!) other Makers.
TL;DR: the 2+mm steel is way too thick - I'd recommend 1-mm or less to get further than I did...
Concept
I'm going to attempt to fabricate my handpan out of a pair of steel woks. In order to get me 80% there with the placement and forming of the notes, I had the idea of creating a concrete jig to hammer into. To that end I designed and resin-printed some 'anti-notes' (i.e. a 'negative' model of each note) that I could place inside one of the woks, before filling it with high-strength concrete.
Reference Links
OnShape
First up was designing the anti-note templates. I used this spreadsheet to help with my design.
I used OnShape to create my 'printable' assets. In that model, the blue pieces are the templates for the anti-notes (I printed a pair of each half-note, coz it was easier to print that way). The variables at the top of the Parts Studio capture the (tidied-up) maths from the spreadsheet.
Important: the note layout/order in my model is not correct: the notes ascend in size as they go around the perimeter. In a real instrument the notes alternate from side to side as they ascend in size (i.e. so your hands can strike left-right-left-right-etc. as they go up/down a scale). Correct note placement obviously happens when assembling the concrete jig...
Concrete Jig
After resin-printing my anti-notes, I laid them out inside the wok and attached them with hot-glue. The idea is that once filled with concrete and de-molded, the anti-notes are removed leaving a jig to hammer the wok skin into.
It is worth noting that the bell on the 'zenith' extends beyond the raw wok shell, so its anti-note is truncated. That note will be hammered 'out' after the other notes are hammered 'in'.
When fabricating my jig, I de-molded the concrete after 15-hours of curing, and was surprised at how fragile it still was - I was expecting the resin-printed plastic and/or hot-glue to give where necessary, but instead managed to chip the concrete around several note 'bells'. I needed to patch those chips with thickened epoxy resin before proceeding...
Bottom Half
The bottom half of a handpan is fairly simple, so was a good place to learn a few things...
First up, plasma-cutting - whoa, that's a cool piece of kit! I laser-cut a jig (circle) out of MDF to constrain the movement of the plasma-cutter tip, and it worked a treat.
Then came some hammering to curve the lip of the hole onto the concrete Bottom Jig. I can now understand why blacksmiths are so buff - that took some muscle! If I was to make the concrete jig again, I'd make the hole deeper to give the hammer head more space to play.
Bugger
So here is where this experiment hits the skids...
The 2+mm steel was just way too thick to work easily - it was very difficult to get the 'crispness' of contour I felt was required around the note borders. And then we managed to split the steel open, and the call was made that any kind of weld/repair would be unlikely to result in a 'good' note.
It was interesting to see how well the concrete+epoxy jig held up under the hammering - I'd be confident that this step of the build would work on 1-mm steel.
OK, what next? What about a DIY Electric Handpan!?
Epilogue
If there was one video I'd recommend from among the many I watched when researching this project, it would have to be What it takes to build a mystical handpan (you'll just need to ignore the weird bald guy that keeps cropping up throughout).
Just, "wow"...
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