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. –Link
6 thoughts on “Hard Drive Wind Chimes”
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I’ve been taking apart my collection of busted HDDs recently, and I have a stack of no less than 20 platters (plus a fridge full of powerful neodium magnets). The wind chime idea occurred to me, but I’m thinking maybe seeing if I can rig a small solar forge out of them. They are REALLY GOOD reflectors and I figure I could bend the platters to make them vaguely dish-shaped, then arrange them in a parabolic arc…
…well, we’ll see. Nice chimes though.
Be careful to use aluminium platters for this – a lot of drives nowadays have platters made of glass!
They’re Al, but thanks for the tip. I didn’t know they were using glass…
…moon pies… what an age we live in.