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Cajon Repair, and Oh boy, I hate going through the learning curve multiple times, lol.

Brent Dowell

Brent Dowell

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Reno NV
So, part of friday afternoon dart club is playing acoustic music out on the back patio. My drummer has a pair of cajons he uses. When he was playing on the other day he managed to break it.

So I ordered some 3mm (1/8") Baltic birch plywood to fix it for him. The actual wood working of cutting, drilling, sanding, and finishing was trivial.

The real problem is that it's been a while since I used the cnc and had to move my collection of 'stuff' off the cnc and then get Lightburn updated. For some reason it wouldn't run after updating, so I had to uninstall/reinstall and somehow managed to lose all my presets (speed/power settings) from before.

Took several runs to dial in the speeds and feeds. Finally got something I'm happy with.

We'll see how the gang likes it tomorrow.

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Ehhh, Tuning Shmooning. Not sure how you would tune this other than thinning the baltic birch. This was made in pakistan, so I don't think there was any tuning done on it originally.

The baltic birch I used is probably a little stiffer than the stuff that was there before. I'll see what the drummer says about it tomorrow.

To my ear it 'might' be a little higher pitch due to being sturdier? If it doesn't work for him, I can run it through my performax drum sander and thin it a bit to tune it if needed.

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Tom Niemi said:
Those are neat! Nice job on the fix! Building one of those is on my bucket list :thumb:
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This one has a little going on inside. It's got a drum head on the back side, some thin metal panels on the right side, and these adjustable snares attached to a rotating piece of pvc for the front.

The construction looks very simple, with 1'2" ply for the majority of the case.


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I like the tensioning system for the PVC pipe holding the snares. Simple but effective. Can those hex screws be accessed with the front plate on?
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
I like the tensioning system for the PVC pipe holding the snares. Simple but effective. Can those hex screws be accessed with the front plate on?
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When I was putting it together, I thought there was just an 'extra' hole on the front, lol. So I omitted it. Apparently, that hole was for inserting a allen wrench through to adjust the tension. I'll be adding that hole back today.

The other thing is that there were 2 shorter screws right above the pvc pipe. I added some super glue to all the holes to reinforce the holes as some of the drywall screws had stripped the holes. I also replaced the screws with some good McFeely's robertsons screws. The screws I put in above the pvc pipe were a little too long and interfered. Discovered I need a couple of shorter screws for those 2.
 
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