NIME weekly update

Last night Meredith and I made substantial progress on our NIME, both the actual piece and the sorting box. I started by cutting the funnels to fit the different balls (the funnels will hold the balls on the top of the arms of the structure) and fitting them into the corresponding tees. We underestimated the width of the ping pong balls when buying hardware, so we need to buy a 1 1/2" tee in the next few days to accommodate the ping pong balls. Meanwhile Meredith starting building the box to sort the different balls by type. We're building it out of plexi that we salvaged from the shop, and it will be approximately 10" wide x 10" deep x 32" high when complete. Meredith painstakingly measured and cut all of the matching squares of plexi for the different levels and side pieces.

After she cut the pieces for the different filter levels, I started drilling holes for the balls to go through. Meredith has a sweet set of drill bits that we're using to drill holes of 3/4" (for the marbles), 7/8" (for the bouncy balls), 1" (for the wooden balls) and 1 1/4" (for the ping pong balls). I'm going to finish this process in the next several days, and Meredith is going to start assembling the box.

We ordered a large (24" in diameter) lazy susan for the base that should be arriving in the next few days, and then we'll be able to start working on making the entire thing spin on an axis. That's going to be a difficult part, as we'll also need to build some kind of extension on the lazy susan that's weighted to keep the whole structure stable.

8' of Steel Plumbing

Today we starting building our NIME (still nameless as of yet). Last Tuesday we went on a shopping spree at Home Depot (courtesy of Meredith's father's gift certificate) and staked out the plumbing isle for a period of about two hours. After playing around with various pieces, we started to build our basic structure with 3/4" plumbing pieces: tees, couplers, reducing couplers, elbows, and of course, nipples. The Home Depot employees alternated between amused and horrified at our structure, and they didn't even get to see it in all its glory (as shown here). After assembling the pieces we bought, we've decided it's a little too tall, so the next implementation will be about a foot shorter. We have four large white funnels that will be attached to the four tees on the ends of the top branch-like structures. Also, in the model, each of the four handles are each attached to the main pole with a tee, but we just discovered the existence of the cross (the plumbing kind, not the Jesus kind) that should eliminate the need for four tees (and also then reduce the height). As of right now, we're still trying to figure out how exactly to make the base - possible some sort of modified lazy susan. Whatever we use will have to be heavily weighted to keep the whole thing stable -- it's heavy! When we meet this coming Tuesday, we hope to have a lazy susan to start working with. We've also placed online orders for rubber bouncy balls, marbles, wooden balls, and ping pong balls, which have started to arrive this week.