After I added the tapered mouthpiece to the whistles, and with the hotdog-red ABS, these things remind me of a toy wienermobile I used to have. Thus the name.

This panflute is slightly more practical than the one it's derived from. The curved shape is easier to use than the circle, and I added a bit of taper to the mouthpiece to make it easier to blow on a single whistle. Still not a practical musical instrument, though!

This one has a diatonic scale (CDEFGABC) instead of chromatic like the other one. I had to learn the OpenSCAD lookup() function for that!

Procedurally-generated panpipes for 3D printing. They really whistle, but they aren't particularly accurately tuned. OpenSCAD file included.

It'll theoretically play a chromatic scale (12 notes to the octave) but it's too squeaky to know for sure!

The JelTone is a (partially!) edible toy piano made for the Gowanus Studio's Jell-O Mold Competition, and also shown at the Solid Sound Festival. Check out the videos: moonmilk.com/2011/07/09/meet-the-jeltone/

Design and construction by Astrida Valigorsky, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Mimi Hui, and Catarina Mota.

After I posted the organ pipe whistle thingiverse.com/thing:311 two years ago, I designed a full octave of pipes and told myself I'd post the files just as soon as I cleaned them up a little. Well, it took a few years, but I finally got around to it.

These files contain 13 organ pipe whistles, not tuned to any particular standard, but they're pretty much in tune relative to each other. The files are partly optimized to reduce the number of cuts by sharing long flat edges, but this means it's a bit more work to copy and paste single parts.

Design note - here's the silly way I tuned the 13 whistles: I started with a single whistle and copied it, and then doubled the length of the pipe above the fipple. Then I put those two pipes on opposite ends of a wide document and drew a diagonal line between their tops. I made 11 more copies of the pipe and distributed them equally between the little one and the big one, and then manually dragged their tops until they hit the diagonal line. Instant equal-tempered scale!

This is a crude but working violin made in an 8-bit, pixelated style. Here's some videos of the thing in action: moonmilk.com/2011/04/17/8-bit-violin-played-by-real-fiddlers/

(It was on Make:Live on March 9th, 2011: makezine.com/live/)

It's laser-cut from 1/8" plywood (front and back faces), 3/16" plywood (bridge), and 1/4" solid wood (everything else). It's a messy design, and not fully refined, because I really didn't know what I was doing when I made it.

License notes: all rights are reserved, but I grant you all permissions under the CC-BY-SA license creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ if you promise that if you make any substantial changes or improvements to this design that result in a working instrument, you'll publish your version of the design to Thingiverse and tell me about it. And in general, if you make and/or perform with an instrument based on this design, I'd like to hear about it.

The document "8bit violin scratchpad" contains bitmap images I found on the net, and I don't claim any copyright on those.

This simple noisy gadget uses a method known since the 19th century to generate the notes of a scale: the number of teeth on each gear corresponds to the frequency of a note, so when you let something buzz against each gear, you'll hear the corresponding note. Here's a video of the thing in action: flickr.com/photos/ranjit/5472598312/

This set of gears creates a just intonation diatonic scale - all the pitch ratios are related by simple fractions. The gears have 24, 27, 30, 32, 36, 40, 45 and 48 teeth.

You could use an optical sensor like a photo interrupter to pick up the pitches, or if you cut the gears from steel, you could use magnetic pickups like the Telharmonium did back in 1898! synthmuseum.com/magazine/0102jw.html

This is a quick-and-dirty replacement for a missing hammer on an upright piano. Video at flickr.com/photos/ranjit/5430307892/

The pictured hammers were lasercut from 1/4" poplar, glued together in pairs to be 1/2" thick and then sanded down to 0.4" to match the original hammers. The extended slot in the bottom allows you to glue the hammer onto the old broken shafts instead of replacing them, and to tilt them to the right to hit the strings at the right angle. The felt is some wool stuff from a craft drawer. Real hammer heads are mostly felt, but I made these ones mostly wood because it was easier.

An improvised ocarina design - to my surprise, it worked on the first try. Cut from a 3.5 x 11.5 inch slab of 1/4" maple. Check the video to hear what it sounds like: flickr.com/photos/ranjit/5423038441/

With the finger holes on the sides instead of the top, it's not as easy to play as my previous ocarina: thingiverse.com/thing:1816 - but it's way easier to assemble.

This is part of my project to make a crude musical instrument every day in February. (More at moonmilk.com)

I had a 20 by 1.5 inch slab of oak, so I designed an ocarina that could be assembled from cross-sections that would fit on it. It's crude but it really plays! Video at flickr.com/photos/ranjit/4352330523/

I sent around the wrong link for the 2011 roundrect ocarina! If you're looking for that, it's here: thingiverse.com/thing:6182

This is part of my project to make a crude musical instrument every day in February. (More at moonmilk.com)

This is a wooden whistle based on the traditional wooden organ pipe design. The internal pieces are traced from an old organ pipe diagram; they can be laminated together between the two end caps to make a whistle that really whistles.

This was cut from 1/8" basswood.

UPDATE (May 2011): a full chromatic octave of 13 pipes - thingiverse.com/thing:8736
Also I changed the license from all rights reserved to CC-BY-SA.