CIGAR BOX KALIMBAS

Comment

Comment by Rouxdy Blues on April 28, 2013 at 9:12am

I bought a kit with a box and and a kit sans box... these things are incredibly easy to put together.  I put a piezo in and used two sided tape to place it under the lid.... located roughly in the center of the tines halfway between the bar and the soundhole.  Works well!     

Comment by Battmann on April 27, 2013 at 10:59pm

plan on getting this kit soon for you, thanks for adding  to your inventory Ben

Comment by PhilUSAFRet on April 19, 2013 at 8:00pm

Guess I'm one of the "people" who have asked for this.  Glad to see it.  Thanks....plan on putting a pickup in mine.

Comment by C. B. Gitty (Ben) on April 19, 2013 at 4:29pm

I thought folks here might like to take a look at this, as people have been asking me to put it together for a long while: a kalimba hardware parts kit!

Use it with a cigar box, a plank, a dried gourd, whatever. These are the same parts we use on the CBKs we build in-house. We also include a 10-page guide that walks you through building a cigar box kalimba with these parts.

Here is the link to the listing: https://www.cbgitty.com/cubecart/kalimba-thumb-piano-hardware-parts...

Enjoy!

Comment by Diane in Chicago on April 13, 2013 at 6:00pm

I had built a kalimba years ago on a Larranaga box (very thick wood, maybe cedar) using electrician fishing wire and it sounded like hell.  I sometimes buy Hugh Tracy vintage kalimbas on the ebays when they are going cheap, and I take off the tines, clean them up and retune them to something funky.  Sometimes I only use half of the tines so the leftovers were in the drawer.  My eye fell upon them  a couple of days ago, and I stuck them on the Larranaga.  What a world of difference!  It is a pleasant, playable instrument, when before it was more an interesting oddity.

So, sprung steel is the way to go.  Looks like Ben's kit has it!  Mebbe he'll sell us just the tines!

Comment by rusty case on September 26, 2012 at 10:35am

++  :-)

I work with bicycles quite a bit and have a few bad wheels on hand, so thought it would be good to recycle them.

The flat tines must be superior in tone, and a box would have much more projection than a simple board scrap such as I have used.

I'll definitely build fancier as my skills improve !

Next step will be more tines and an improved bridge.

Fun stuff!

rc

Comment by PhilUSAFRet on September 26, 2012 at 10:11am

Great Ben, When I first got interested a few months ago, I made a suggestion to a few sellers that they do this.  Not a surprise you're first.  I got the boxes waiting.

Hopefully there will be instruction on how to tune.

Comment by C. B. Gitty (Ben) on September 26, 2012 at 10:08am

We are soon going to be offering the tines as well as tines+bridge assemblies/kalimba kits. It took a bit of doin' to get it all figured out and come up with a working system, but I have to admit that it works really well and makes creating a kalimba from any thin-lidded box/container quick and easy.

Comment by rusty case on September 26, 2012 at 10:02am

Well, shucks!

You folks are better than me, Ben!   :-)

Do you sell those flat tines?

rc

Comment by PhilUSAFRet on September 25, 2012 at 10:27pm

Nice!  Any tutorial on how to construct that "bridge"

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