Tuesday 9 September 2014

In The Unlikely Event,

that you a have a supply of unwanted bowling balls at your disposal,


here is a neat project for you to complete over the next weekend, construct a frame that sloops upwards from one end to the other and suspend the bowling balls from it with each bowling ball's string a slightly different length, with the shortest string mounted at one end of the series, the next-shortest string mounted next to it, and so on until the longest string is found at the other end, 


for best results, the string lengths should follow a particular formula, as described in this short paper published in the American Journal of Physics in 1991, basically it states, 'the lengths of the pendula are carefully adjusted such that if the longest pendulum executes L oscillations in a time interval T, then each successively shorter pendulum will execute one additional oscillation in that interval', 


also as in this video at the bottom of each balls swing a metal tube is positioned so that each swing of each ball will strike it and make a sound, the only tricky thing about the project is making sure the frame is strong enough to take the weight of the bowling balls and making a mechanism to release them all at the same time, now where can I get 16 or so bowling balls to make my Pendulum Wave musical chime? 


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