My beaters were difficult to make due to the inaccessibility of dowelling, of all things.  Dowling is not readily available in Kazakhstan, can you believe, so I had to adapt everyday items with dowling already incorporated into them.   

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The blue beaters which are not pictured here but appear in photographs elsewhere on the site are made using the cross bars of wooden coat hangers.  All the beaters in the photos above though are made using the handles of wooden spoons!

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The core of the smaller beaters is a piece of wooden cut from a wooden brush handle in roughly 2cm lengths and drilled through.  They are then mounted onto the handle such that about a centimetre of handle protrudes out of the top, and are then stuck in place with wood glue.  The wrapping process then utilises embroidery thread which I tie around the spoon handle, then start to loop over and over the core, twisting the beater as I go and with each loop pulling the thread up against the protruding part of the handle.  After wrapping and turning and wrapping and turning in what is quite a tiring process on your fingers, eventually the ball of thread begins to look quite chunky.  

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As I state elsewhere, the blue beaters were wrapped 250 times, the green ones 200 times, the purple ones 300 times and the red ones 250 times but around a central core made from a rubber ball about the size of a golf ball.  This low end tenor beater needed to be softer to make a more mellow sound and prevent an unpleasant knocking sound when playing the low register keys.  However, due to the extra weight potentially producing enough force to break these keys, the wooden handles are a little shorter so they cannot be played with such force.

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A large darning needle was used to pull the last 50cm of thread in and out in short loops through the beater head to pull all the loops of yarn together in twos, threes, fours or more and so stop the loops of thread from falling off the head and becoming unravelled.  It's a fairly simple exercise to perform and you can find videos on the internet about this like the one in the link given here.

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