Once upon a time, we lived in a small apartment. Things got worse once we got a washer and dryer, because the hookups were in the tiny kitchen. In order to allow for comfortable dining space for three, it turned out that we needed to position the table up against one corner of the room. If we had a rectangular dining table, then someone would always have to sit at the pointy end of the table. If we had a round or oblong table, it would also be rather awkward. The solution was to build a new (funny shaped) table from scratch. And as long as we’re building something, why not make it unique?
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Graduate school can do funny things to your head. Sometimes the urge to procrastinate becomes so overwhelming that you strike out in a great burst of creativity; determined to do something, anything, to avoid that which you’re supposed to be doing. Like the time that I painted my bicycle purple (with green polka dots) to avoid studying for my qualifying exam– but I seem to digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes: hard drive wind chimes. I used to disassemble hard drives, whenever possible, both to extract the magnets and to see how the different types worked. Different hard drives contain all kinds of wonderful components: voice coil motors, stepper motors, exotic bearings, electropolished machined parts, chemically etched metal webs, flexible circuitry, and my personal favorite: optical quadrature encoders for pivot arm position readout. The drive platters themselves are also quite remarkable: precisely made aluminum patters with a surface not unlike recording tape. The disks make a lovely clear note if you strike them, so it was only natural to make them into a set of wind chimes.
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