Make a Bamboo Wind Chime

With the work on the hardwood complete, we'll turn our attention to the bamboo tubes. Take a look at your two 6'-long bamboo tubes. One should be naturally thicker than the other one.

For this particular wind chime, we chose to make five tubes that were each five inches shorter than the next. In retrospect, for the next wind chime we'll make the distance between the tubes much less, for two reasons. First, cutting the tubes only two inches shorter than the next tube will keep the tones relatively close, making for more melodic sounds. The second reason to have the pieces relatively close in size is to help keep the top circle shape more level when the piece is hung. In our prototype, the longest piece is 34" long and the shortest is 14", which means much more weight will be on one side of the chime than the opposite side. However, the beauty of this project is that you can modify it to any size you feel will be appropriate.

With that in mind, we'd recommend cutting two lengths of bamboo from the larger piece, one at 30" and another at 28". This procedure can be accomplished with a miter saw, but we found there was less splintering if we cut the pieces with a cross-cut hand saw.

Cut the smaller piece of bamboo into three pieces, 26", 24" and 22".

Next, we'll cut the fluted bottom edges of the five pieces. You can cut almost any shape you'd like, but we thought the shape as shown in the picture above was appealing. To cut this shape, mark a straight 5" line up from the bottom of the tube. From the top of the straight line, angle your pencil mark up to the edge of the bamboo (at about a 45-degree angle). Then, match this same angle from the bottom edge of the bamboo piece to the center line. The pencil line should approximate the profile shown in the picture above.