My daughter teaches elementary school music and art and this year has been a challenging one.  She has a blind student in one of her art classes and she also has a deaf child in her music class.  The boy in her music class has cochlear implants and has very limited hearing so she has to sign to him.  She came up with the idea of making a drum that he could sit on and "feel" the sound so she drafted me to help.  The drum is called a cajon(pronounced cahone) and this one is made of 1/2" baltic birch plywood with a 1/4 baltic birch rear panel and an 1/8" tapa or skin.  The screw configuration on the tapa is really neat because the placement of the screws at the top lets you slap the corners to produce a higher pitched sound.  The sound resonates though the cajon and comes out a 4" hole at the rear. 

The hardest part of the project was finding the 1/8" plywood for the tapa and I ended up ordering it from Pennsylvania.  Side note: Two sheets of 15 X 30 plywood was $8 and the shipping was $17.  All in a days work, right?

 

That is so cool Ron, and for a wonderful thing too. So how does it sound, have you tried it out yet?

 

She loves it John.  I'll post a video in a bit.

Nice project! Helping kids fit in and being able to participate is so important.

 

As a side note, we had a student in our Computer Technology class that has no arms and no legs. It was amazing to see how adaptive a person can be.

 Here's yours truly.

 

https://youtu.be/Gx1iVn8Su3M

1 hour ago, Ron Dudelston said:

 Here's yours truly.

https://youtu.be/Gx1iVn8Su3M

Awesome Ron! Thanks for the video, first off it's a joy to see you in person Ron, we live so far apart, when I see you in person talking and being Ron, it's just a really neat thing, thanks for that. And the cajon is really cool too, it's has a pretty big sound for that size box! I was surprised.

Nice work, hope it works great.

It would have been great if you could have found an old base musical drum to make the seat out of.