Cutting the Pipe for a Xylophone

Video Transcript

"Now one thing we don't think of very often is how to cut metal. We could use a hack saw, but, it's not that efficient. It takes a long time and you're going to need to put every piece of metal through a vice grip one more time, which is going to take a lot of excess time away from your project. So, in any hardware store, or a lot of craft and hobby stores, you could get a pipe cutter. It's a plumber's tool. But today, we're going to use it to make a xylophone. And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a very, very hard piece of steel. Copper is a very soft metal. So, when we close the hard steel around the soft copper we then twist. After we do a couple rotations, we're going to do about an eighth of a turn and go around again. When that gets easy again, another eighth. Now, we repeat this process until the copper pipe has separated. It's a really cool tool. It's easy to use and it makes the job go a lot faster. The other thing that this does is that it gives us a good clean cut. If you can get in here, you can see that it's not a jagged saw cut. But rather, it's a nice smooth cut. It really does a nice job. So now that we've talked about how to cut our pipe it's time to start talking about how we're going to make the rest of our xylophone. "