Cajon Drum Prototype

Over the last few days my father and I have been working on a prototype cajon drum using designs and tutorial videos found on the internet (the sources for which are listed in a previous post), as well as some improvisation and customization on our part based on the materials available to us as well as some mistakes made.

The drum we've made is very much a practise run and there are certain aspects of its design that did not go so well at the time of building. But, importantly, there have been lessons learned from the mistakes and we plan to improve on the design and build a superior version of the drum.

In that respect building this initial version has been extremely beneficial. Although the drum is designed to be purely acoustic according to the traditional design, and so other issues such as electronic have not yet been addressed, its building has highlighted that creating a box of this kind is not as straight forward as first thought and there's plenty of room for mistakes.

Despite all that, the box functions perfectly well as a drum. It is possible to find different tones across the playing surface (tapa) and to combine these into interesting rhythms. Most importantly, its a lot of fun to play.

Here are some pictures of the design and basic playing position:

In this last one you can make out that the box is slightly tipped backwards during playing to allow more comfortable access to the tapa.

Design details:

• 12mm thick plywood for sides, back, top and bottom
• Joined with wood glue and nails (using nail gun)
• 3.6mm thick plywood for tapa
• Joined with screws

I'll write up some detailed design details for the next version since its likely to be the finally and should have no mistakes.

I now need to decide on some design details relating to the electronic version including:

• Loudspeaker size, since this will inform the required diameter of the "sound hole" in the back where the loudspeaker will be mounted.
• I know loudspeaker size will also affect the required size of the box (in terms of volume) but I'm not sure how. I may have to ask David Creasey about this...
• I need to make sure that I have easy access to the inside of the box to place the electronics, this should be possible through unscrewing the tapa.
• I need to think about issues around transducers and their placement for my DMI since I haven't actually got a concrete plan yet.