Introduction:
My father, his friend, and I just finished constructing a really nice didj out of a 4x4 of knotless douglas fir. I've never heard of anyone using the method we used, so I thought I'd send it to you to see if you think it is worth posting on the W3 server.
Materials and Tools Needed:
Construction Procedure:
We began by slicing the wood in half lengthwise on the table saw.
Notice that this is
different than just buying two 2x4s, since it insures that you will
get two absolutely flush edges. Then comes the new step. We clamped
the long piece of straight wood onto the table saw, on the left side
of the blade, at approximately 10 degrees to the left of center, using
totally in line with the blade as O degrees. We then ran each half of
the 4x4 through this jig several times, using several different blade
heights in order to approximate a taper on the inside. We had the
final blade height @ 3/4" @ the mouth piece end(keep in mind that
since you are working with halves, the blade height will = half of the
final diameter, so in this case I have a 1 1/2" diameter
mouthpiece(wax excluded), and 1 1/2 " at the other end. By running
the wood through at and angle, you effectively use the blade as a
router bit, which rips a semi-circular canal through the wood.
This is not quite how
table saw blades were meant to be used, and as such this method
created a lot of heat and potential for kickback, so it is important
to take the blade height up in several steps. For example, we started
off at 3/8" and used three 1/8" increases until arriving at the
desired 3/4" semicircle.
Then we cut off the corners of our two halves, so as to make planing the outside into an approximate truncated cone that much easier. After the inside had the correct shape, the two pieces were glued together and clamped tightly.
You can save yourself
trouble at this point by wiping off excess glue while it is still
wet.
When the glue was dry, we used the hand planer to shape the outside.
After that, we used a small router bit to round the inside of the
mouthpiece end. If a router is not accessible, a rasp would work too,
it would just be a bit of a hassle. I wrapped each end with leather
strips in order to prevent splitting. Hose clamps work well too, but
they do not look as nice. Finally, the instrument was finished on the
inside and out with mineral oil, and a beeswax moutnpiece was added.
The didj sounds great and I highly recommend this method to anyone looking to have a nice wood didj that is more affordable than one from Australia, while sounding much better than one made of bamboo or ABS plastic. Possible areas for experimentation include: deliberately roughing out, or smoothing out the inside, using different woods, or carving and/or burning designs on the outside.
Happy playing,
Jesse Gay (jgay@reed.edu)
(503) 230-0711
