Mini kalimba thumb piano acoustic box by RexGoodheart

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Well, I bought a mini kalimba thumb piano... don't know why, because I'm the most musically-challenged person on the planet... and because it's so small it's both hard to hear and hard to play. So, motivated by reviews that say the larger hollow kalimbas sound better, are louder, and are easier to hold and play, and owing to the fact that I had some wood filament on hand, I decided to design something which allows me to transform this thing into something larger.
Well, it worked. This acoustic box makes the kalimba significantly louder. Now, it does suffer a bit of reverb/resonance loss, but the volume was so slight who could tell that anyway?
Anyway, in order to avoid supports I designed it to print vertically, with an arc'ed top that resembles a jukebox. I printed with solid walls (5mm thick) but the box interior is hollow. If you experience an imperfect fit when you drop in the kalimba (which would cause some rattling sounds when you play the tines) just use some electrical tape around the sides of the slot in order to make it a tighter fit.
With solid walls (i.e. 100% infill) it took 21 hours to print, with a 4mm nozzle and 40mm/second print speed, but you might try adjusting those to speed it up. Don't know what effect that might have on sound volume/quality.
This is the mini kalimba for which it's designed:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FY17N4S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1