HD wind chime

Time for a fun recycling project once again, this time in the form of a wind chime! I’ve been collecting some defunct harddisks, envisioning about turning their platters into something “musical”. A wind chime seemed like a good starting point, as building one doesn’t take much work. Besides the platters, I ended up using a burn-failed CDr and glass rods stripped from some old flatbed scanner. These were assembled together using fishing line and clear packing tape.

I decided to test drilling holes to some of the platters to see how much they could be tuned, as the size of the platter seemed to contribute to its pitch. The less mass, the higher the pitch.. No overall tuning plan really, just pick some drill bit and a pattern and drill away. I guess the tuning could be even precisely calculated using some mass/density formula. Not that I have any idea what that might be :)

Assembled HD wind chime

I didn’t bother documenting any of the work phases, but below is a short video clip of the wind chime in action. As the chime is hung on a windless location, I had to spin it by hand. What a useful thing ;)

Design could be improved in a number of ways, but maybe I’ll leave it up to YOU! If you make one, do share it.

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