Music Boxes and Movement Questions

As you guys know, I cannot make anything standard, so I got to thinking about making a jewelery box that is truly unique. Anyway I want to build a high-bred jewelery box that incorporates a musical box in it as well. The problem is I am going to be tight on room, and I have never dealt with music box movements before. I looked some up online and realized I know nothing about them and therefore cannot order what I want. Here are some questions.

• Do I want battery power or wind up?
• How do you find out how big they are? I need one to fit in a 4 inch square space. Possible?
• I want a high quality sound. That raspy stuff is just not going to cut it on such a high-end jewelery box? Any brand suggestions?
• Any ideas where to order high quality music movements?

Normally I don't like to say what it is I am designing until its done, but since your family I'll share. I want to make a jewelry box in the shape of this lighthouse. The lid will be where the roof line is and tip up. There will be a divided till underneath that with the main area of the jewelery box being the lighthouse keepers lower quarters. The music box portion will be stuffed inside the square lighthouse portion of the lighthouse. The last detail will be the lighthousetails. These will be like dovetails and mesh pins into sockets, but the pins will be in the shape of lighthouses stuffed into matching socket shapes. This is like the bulldozer tails, lovetails and pistoltails I have made in the past. A challenge to make but truly unique.

I don't know how well it will come out, but its still kind of a cool idea (I thought anyway). The LOML will be pleased.

In my limited knowledge of music boxes...

• Wind up is the only way to go for an heirloom.
• 4 x 4 space should be no problem for the average 20 to 40 note movement. Here's a 30-note movement that would easily fit. If you could go an inch wider, you could fit a 50-note movement.
• The high-end boxes have wind-up, plinkey-plinkety music movements. The nicer the box, the more notes are played (and the bigger the footprint). A good one can still sound pretty rich.
• I believe a lot of the trick to making one sound good is to have the proper resonance. What exactly is "proper", I couldn't tell you, but I know the tone changes drastically when you change what the movement is mounted in or on.

Here are a few that I found on sale.

Thanks Vaughn, I think that will work. In my very limited research of music boxes I have found out an interesting thing. Sound travels nicely through Spruce and I have a ton of spruce lumber already milled out and dried in my solar kiln. This may work out just fine.

Thanks again for the link. I'll be sure to let you know how this all plays out,