This is a rain stick. It's a tube that's meant to simulate the sound of rain.
Sorta. Hey, welcome to woodworking for mere mortals. I'm Steven and on this channel
I want to share with you my passion for woodworking and show you how you can
get started in this fun hobby without a huge space or a million dollars.
If you haven't already done so be sure to download my free guide to setting up a
workshop for under $1000 at MyToolList.com. Sorta. I'm gonna make this all
out of quarter-inch plywood. I'm gonna set the bevel on my saw to 30 degrees or
60 degrees depending on how you look at it. Having one of these bevel boxes is
really handy. I'm using a scrap of cherry plywood. It's got a good face and
not-so-good face so I want all of those to match and if you're using plywood
that's the same on both sides it's gonna be much easier. What you can
do is cut out the strips and as soon as you cut one you can just flip the board
around and then cut out the opposite bevel so that both bevels are facing in.
In this case if I did that every other strip would be backwards so cut out this
strip to show you what's going on here. I want both of these bevels to go in this
way which means it needs to be cut like this. The only problem with my rip fence
is it has this gap here and the beveled edges of the cuts I will slide under
there so I need to attach a board here. I'll just clamp this in place to keep
the board from sliding under it and I'll lock this in a little bit wider than my
final width and I just want to keep reminding myself that the bevel goes
inward towards the backside.
Okay, hopefully here you can see what's going on. This is the piece I just cut
out from right there and this is my good face and the bad face is back here and
that bevel goes towards that backside. If the plywood was the same on both sides
that it would be easy to do this. All I would need to do is flip this board
around this way and make that cut and just keep flipping the board as I go. But
again, if I did that in this case I would have a two-tone rainstick with the kind
of icky side and then the nice good side. So my solution is to cut all six of
these strips a little bit oversized then adjust my rip fence to their exact width.
The whole idea here is that I just don't want to keep moving my rip fence once
I've got it set to exact width. So now I've got a bunch of strips with the
bevels going in the same direction so obviously I need this bevel to come in
towards that back side. Lift the board around this way and now I need to slide
my fence over to about there. I'm sure there's other ways I could do this but
this just seems like a simple no fuss way of getting it done.
To glue these up I'm going to first tape them together with some masking tape.
For those of you who are new to my show I always use Tight Bond 2 wood glue. And
finally I want to put some glue on one of these outside edges, now I should be
able to just carefully roll this up.
I'm going to use some rubber bands to clamp this together. It doesn't need a
whole lot of clamping pressure. Mainly I just want to make sure that there's no
gaps in between those seams. I think you could also clamp this together just by
running some tape all the way around it. Okay that looks pretty good.
Let that dry for a while. Now I can square up the end.
I'll cut things out with my jigsaw. They don't have to be exact, I'll sand
them down to their exact fit later. I'm drilling a real shallow half-inch
diameter hole on the backside being careful that I don't poke through the
other side. This is a Forstner bit. It gives you a nice flat bottomed hole. But you could just
use a regular drill bit too. And that's all I'm looking for. So those little holes
are gonna act as sort of a guide for this half inch dowel rod. It'll just sit
in there and keep it centered. It doesn't have to be a tight fit at all. Now I need
to cut down this dowel to its exact length and to do that I'll just drop one
of these in place and slide this over without breaking my lights out. Drop it
down like that and you can see I need to take about a quarter inch off.
Perfect. I picked up some of this wire mesh to use for the baffles inside the
rain stick. It's also called hardware cloth. I have no idea why it's called a
cloth but I can only find it in this five foot length which I'm not going to
need even a fraction of that but it was $10. I'm sure you could probably come up
with other things to put inside of this that will have the same effect, or you
could just buy a rabbit and make a cage out of the rest of this. Just another
money saving tip. And now I've just got about a billion more of these to cut out.
Well I don't know how many of these I cut but it took me about an hour. I'm
gonna start putting these on the dowel and I'm just going to slide them down.
Kind of looks like a weapon at this point. A little bit of Neegan's baseball
bat I think. I really think it would be worth experimenting with different
materials to make a rain stick with. Traditionally they were made out of say
bamboo and they would have like spikes put in through the sides or out of types
of cactus and they would use the the quills or the little needles inside. Well
amazingly I cut just enough of those to fit on this dowel. Okay let's see if I
can drop this into here. That is a snug fit. Oh that sound though. So really with all
those baffles in there I didn't really need to make this hole because that is
not going to move, but I'll go ahead and glue it on anyway.
I'll use this other piece just to have something to clamp against.
Now comes the fun part: filling this up with rain you can use all different
kinds of materials. Little steel bb's would work really well. They'd probably
make a better sound since it would be metal hitting metal inside. I don't have
any of those so I'm gonna use some rice
I'm going to finish this with some Danish Oil. You just wipe this on.