When adding the nails and eyelets to the frame, we followed the instructions in Make Your Own Marimbas which have you mount all the eyelets and nails in the frame before the resonator modules are built. But some of the bars ended up not being centered over the resonators. In retrospect, I think we should have put the eyelets and nails into the frame after the modules were mounted in the frame to make sure that each bar sat squarely its respective resonator. After we nailed the finishing nails into the frame, my husband used his handy Dremel tool to grind down the head of the finishing nail. By having a narrower head, it makes it easier to get the bars onto the frame. When we first tried out some of the bars, the nails buzzed against the bars. We reduced this problem by putting a little heat shrink tubing (available at hardware stores or your local Radio Shack) around each finishing nail. This acted as a buffer between the bar and the nail. It works, but it would have been nice to find something a little softer to pad the nails with (like a small, thin rubber hose).

(diagram modified from Make Your Own Marimbas, p. 25)

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