Bogdan’s Marimba

I make musical instruments focusing mostly on concert percussion and drums. As a drummer and a percussionist, I find great pleasure in playing musical instruments and an even greater pleasure in making musical instruments.

The highlight in my portfolio presents a full concert marimba. It is a wonderful instrument with an amazing appearance and sound. As a woodworker, there is a great challenge in making a marimba, combining different materials and methods for assembling the different parts together. The biggest challenge is to make a marimba that is easy to assemble/dissasemble with minimal parts. Wood glue is used only on mortise and tenon joints on the sides of the frame. Every other piece is either hinged or there is a metal bracket holding the pieces together.

The frame is walnut and finished with a water-based varnish. The resonators are made from aluminum tubing and the curved resonators are from welded plastic tubing.

The most valuable component in a marimba is the keyboard. It consists of 61 bars of different width, length and thickness. The wood is a very precious honduras rosewood. Every bar is tuned to the exact pitch. The bars are polished to a glossy finish with no varnish.

More picture on the building process are available on my youtube channel.