Kind of a fun musical instrument isn’t it? It’s just made out of a stick, some wire, some flattened bottle caps and a little bit of color on your part to put it together. So, what you’re going to need for this project is a stick that has a handle and three parts to it. You’re going to need pliers, a hammer, some nails, some wire and some bottle caps. So, I've already found my stick and I've trimmed it down a little bit.
So what I need to do next is flatten out all my bottle caps. With my pliers I'm going to I'm going to gentle pull open the edges so that I can hammer it flat. You have to be really careful not to hammer your fingers flat and here we go. The idea is that all of these placed next to each other are going to make the sound that that makes. There we go, last one.
Okay, now the next thing we have to do is, we need to have a little some kind of a board underneath and this is where the nails come in and your hammering, you’re just going to put a hole right through your bottle tops. And of course you need to make certain that when you choose your wire, the size of your nail that your nails going to make big enough holes that your wire to thread through. So, make sure that you’re aware of that.
Now, to those of you who have a tendency to miss the nail like I just did and hit your finger, you may want to use your pliers and actually hold the nail in place and then go ahead and hammer. I think that’s the way I'm going to continue to do this so that I don’t smash on my fingers. And we’ve got the last one done in here, now we’re going to go ahead and start to do our wire, do our wrapping. So, you’re going to want to pull out some wire that’s longer than the area, probably double the size of the area that you’re actually going to be wrapping so that you’ve got room to wrap wire around the stick, the extra wire.
So, let’s start at the bottom and you’re going to leave about an inch or so and you’re going to wrap the shorter wire around the longer wire. At the very end, you might want to use your pliers to just kind of pinch it in like so. And then you’re going to thread a couple of these, you might be wondering can I decorate these because maybe you don’t the other side of the bottle cap to show but you want the sound to be there, so if you painted these like with acrylic paint it would most likely deadened the sound that you would get from the bottle caps hitting each other.
Now, I'm just going to stretch it across here and I'm going to wrap this around the wire that is already stretched. It really doesn’t matter what kind of wire you use, I used copper wire because that’s what I happen to have. You can use a silver colored, whatever. And then, I’m just going to cut these excess off, okay. So there we have our first one.
This one is pretty small so I'm probably only going to put 2 bottle caps between here and then we’ll go across the top part. I would say that it most likely depends on what kind of stick you’ll find. The short end is going to wrap around the longer end carefully so you have like a little spiral and then bend it down with my pliers. Then I'm going to put 2 bottle caps on here. You have to have at least two so they make some sound. If you wanted to, you could sand off the bark, peel off the bark on your stick and paint it if wanted to. You could tie ribbons on to the bottom of it so it looks kind of like a tambourine that’s been decorated. I mean the options are totally up to you, how fancy you want to make it and how much work you want to put to into it. So I'm going to cut this off here. So heres what we have so far, now I'm going to do one up here and one across this way. On those, I'm going to put more bottle caps on. Take your pliers and pinch it, okay. So you have a finished look here with a spiral all around the wires and there we go.
And there we have it. Don’t forget that over time these bottle caps will rust especially if you leave them outside and they’ll take on an older look. They’ve gone through a lot of wear and tear and they’re definitely rusted and then you won’t have the colors from the backsides of the bottle caps to look at. Don’t forget you could use wood stain to stain these, you could paint them with bright colored paint if you wanted to. You could use colored wires; you could use all different kinds of bottle caps if you wanted to push along the idea of the different colors that are there until they rust. So have fun making music.
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