Becoming a maker

MAK-15Can I make my own handpan, and should I?#

beginner

Short answer. Yes, you can, and people do it every year from kits and bought shells. Whether you should depends entirely on whether you want an instrument or want a craft, because the fastest route to a good handpan is buying one and the route to making one is measured in years.

Be clear with yourself about the goal.

If you want a handpan to play, making one is a bad plan. A first attempt from a bought shell will cost you several hundred in materials, dozens of hours, and will almost certainly produce something with unstable pitches, weak sustain and audible crosstalk. Experienced builders say this plainly. One long standing guide puts it as: you will not have a good sounding handpan, at least not at first. Meanwhile a serviceable factory instrument can be had for a few hundred and a good one for a couple of thousand.

If you want to learn a craft, it is a wonderful one, and there has never been a better time to start. Deep drawn shells are commercially available, tools are sold openly, tuning software exists, and there are more people willing to teach than there were ten years ago. The barrier is no longer secrecy or access to materials. The barrier is the thousands of hours of hand and ear training described in MAK-13.

A middle path many people take: buy a pair of ready made shells, build one instrument end to end, and treat it as an education rather than a product. You will learn more about what a good handpan is than any amount of reading gives you, and you will understand exactly what you are paying for next time you buy. Just budget the money as tuition, not as an instrument.

Things that predict success: prior experience in metalwork, panel beating, silversmithing or especially steelpan tuning; access to someone who will look over your shoulder; patience with delayed feedback; and a workshop you can make noise in. Things that predict failure: expecting a playable result in a weekend, working from YouTube alone, and trying to rush the rest periods.

See also: MAK-16, MAK-18

MAK-16What does it realistically take to start making handpans?#

intermediate

Short answer. A few thousand in tools and materials to begin, a workshop you can hammer in for hours without complaints, access to a heat treatment furnace, and two to five years before you are making instruments worth selling.

Money. The entry cost is lower than most people expect and the ongoing cost is higher. A rough sketch:

• Deep drawn shells from a specialist supplier, sold in top and bottom pairs, are the usual starting point. Budget for several sets, because your first few will not survive.
• Tuning rings and a stand: a complete ring set with hardware is available in the low hundreds of euros.
• Hammers: nylon faced tuning hammers around the tens of euros each, taxi hammers cheaper, plus whatever you use for rough shaping.
• Muting magnets, adhesive (Merbenit HS60 is the trade standard, sold by the tube), abrasives and rust protection: a few hundred to get going.
• Software: LinoTune or an equivalent spectrum analyser.
• Heat treatment: almost nobody starts with their own nitriding furnace. You send shells to a commercial heat treater, which means minimum batch sizes, lead times and a recipe you will spend years refining.

Call it two to five thousand to be properly equipped, plus materials you will scrap.

Space. Handpan making is loud, in a sustained, penetrating way, for hours at a stretch. A shared wall is a problem. You also need somewhere the instrument can rest undisturbed between tuning passes, which means a workshop you are not clearing every weekend.

Time. Not just the forty to eighty hours per instrument, but the calendar. Because of rest periods you cannot compress learning by working harder. You can only work on more instruments in parallel, which multiplies your material cost.

The honest bit. The tools are cheap relative to the skill. Nothing on the list above is what stands between you and a good instrument. What stands between you is the number of tuning hours you have accumulated, and there is no shortcut through that.

See also: MAK-12, MAK-13

MAK-17Are there handpan making courses, and where?#

intermediate

Short answer. Yes, but they are far rarer than playing workshops and they are not usually advertised widely. Most run as small hands on sessions with an established maker, arranged directly, and a short course teaches you the process rather than the skill.

Be careful with search results here. The overwhelming majority of things called a “handpan workshop” or “handpan course” are playing lessons, not building. Building courses exist but you generally find them by asking makers directly, through maker forums, or through supply companies who know who is teaching.

The formats that exist:

One to one or small group sessions with a maker. The most valuable and the hardest to get. Typically a few days to a couple of weeks in someone’s workshop, covering shaping and the beginnings of tuning. Availability comes and goes, since a maker teaching is a maker not building.

Occasional multi day building courses. Run sporadically in Europe and North America, sometimes attached to festivals. Usually you leave with an instrument of some kind and a realistic sense of how far you are from a good one.

Steelpan tuning courses. Genuinely useful and much more established, because Trinidadian steelpan tuning has a longer pedagogical tradition. The physics and much of the hammer technique transfer directly. If you cannot find handpan tuition, this is the best adjacent training available.

Online material. Video series and paid courses exist and can teach the sequence, the vocabulary and the tool list. What they cannot teach is hammer feel, which needs someone watching you.

Mentorship. Still the most common route into the craft, and worth pursuing above any paid course. Makers are more approachable than the community’s reputation for secrecy suggests, particularly if you approach as someone willing to sweep floors and prepare shells rather than someone wanting the recipe.

Because provision changes constantly and courses are often announced only to mailing lists, this page deliberately names no specific course. Ask in maker communities for current offerings rather than trusting an older list.

See also: MAK-20, Community and culture

MAK-18Can I make a handpan from a propane tank or gas bottle?#

beginner

Short answer. You can make a good steel tongue drum from a propane tank, and people have been doing it since the mid 2000s. You cannot make a handpan from one, because the steel is far too thick and the wrong shape for hammered tone fields.

This is one of the most persistent confusions in the hobby, and it comes from a real project: the “hank drum”, made by cutting a propane tank in half and cutting tongues into the top with a jigsaw or plasma cutter. It works, it is genuinely fun, it costs almost nothing, and it produces a pleasant instrument. Dennis Havlena published plans that circulated widely and inspired thousands of builds.

But look at what it actually is. A tongue drum makes pitch by cutting tongues of metal that vibrate as cantilevers, tuned by adjusting tongue length. A handpan makes pitch by hammering a dimpled tone field into a thin dome, tuned by shaping the curvature and border so that three partials line up. They are different instruments with different physics.

Why a gas bottle cannot become a handpan:

• Thickness. Propane cylinder steel is typically two to three millimetres or more. Handpan shells run around one millimetre. You cannot hammer three millimetre steel into tone fields with hand tools, and even if you could, the stiffness would give you almost no sustain.
• Geometry. A cylinder end is not a synclastic shallow dome. The curvature that makes a handpan note work is not there.
• Material and heat treatment. Cylinder steel is not chosen for acoustic properties and has not had the forming and heat treatment history a shell has.
• No tuned harmonics. Even a well made tongue drum generally gives you a fundamental and not the tuned octave and compound fifth stack that gives a handpan its bell like fusion.

So what should you actually build? If you want a cheap, satisfying weekend project that makes real music, build the tongue drum. It is a genuinely good instrument on its own terms and no less legitimate for being cheap. If you want a handpan, buy proper shells. Suppliers sell deep drawn top and bottom sets for exactly this purpose and it is the only sane starting point.

See also: MAK-15, Related instruments

MAK-19Is there money in making handpans?#

advanced

Short answer. There is a modest living for a skilled maker with a reputation and a waiting list, and very little for anyone else. The economics are constrained by the fact that output is capped by hours and scrap rate, not by demand.

Work through the arithmetic honestly.

Revenue is capped by hours. At forty to eighty hours per instrument, a full time solo maker working hard might complete somewhere in the region of twenty five to fifty instruments a year, and many make fewer. Workshops that reach the low hundreds annually do it by adding people, not by going faster. Multiply by a realistic price and you have your ceiling. There is no version of this business where you sell ten times more by working smarter, because the tuning cannot be delegated to unskilled labour or automated.

Costs are not trivial. Shells, heat treatment, adhesive, consumables, tools, workshop rent, shipping (heavy, fragile, international), payment processing, packaging, and the instruments you scrap. Scrap is the quiet killer: if you lose one in eight builds, every finished instrument carries the material and labour of the failures.

Cash flow is awkward. Deposits help, but you are financing weeks of work per instrument, and if a build fails late you have consumed the money and have nothing to deliver.

Competition has intensified. Widely available deep drawn shells lowered the barrier to entry dramatically. Many more makers now exist than a decade ago, at every quality level, and price pressure from high volume workshops is real at the lower end.

What actually works. Makers who do well tend to have some combination of: a distinctive voice people seek out by name; a long waiting list built over years; a second income stream such as retuning, repairs, shell supply, teaching, or selling tools; and low overheads. Retuning other makers’ instruments is an underrated line of business, since it is skilled, quick relative to a build, and demand grows with the installed base.

What does not work. Undercutting on price. You are competing with workshops that have optimised for volume, and racing them to the bottom while doing everything by hand is a losing position.

Nobody sensible enters this craft for the money. People enter it because they want to spend their working life hammering steel into tune, and the good ones eventually make a reasonable living at it.

See also: MAK-08, BIZ-04

MAK-20How do makers learn, given how secretive the craft has been?#

advanced

Short answer. Mostly by reverse engineering, by trial and error over years, and increasingly by mentorship and open sharing. The craft was genuinely closed in the 2000s and has opened up substantially since, though the details that matter most, particularly heat treatment recipes, still stay in the workshop.

The history explains the culture. PANArt developed the Hang from Trinidadian steelpan work and did not publish their methods. When demand vastly exceeded supply in the mid 2000s, people who wanted the instrument and could not get one started trying to build it. That first generation, from around 2007 onwards, largely reverse engineered the instrument from the outside: measuring, listening, guessing at heat treatment, and failing repeatedly. Some had steelpan backgrounds, which helped enormously.

Several things changed after that:

Shells became a product. Once suppliers began selling deep drawn shells, the hardest capital intensive step was available to anyone. This alone probably did more to open the craft than any deliberate sharing.

Tools and software became public. Tuning hammers, rings, stands, magnets and adhesives are now sold openly by supply shops. Spectrum analysis software written for the task is available to anyone.

Forums and communities formed. Handpan.org from 2009 and later Facebook groups gave builders somewhere to compare notes. The general standard of instruments rose noticeably as a result.

Some makers began teaching. Not many, and not systematically, but enough that mentorship is now a realistic path rather than a fantasy.

What remains closed: nitriding and heat treatment recipes, which makers describe as years of refinement and treat as their core intellectual property; note layout templates, which encode enormous accumulated knowledge; and the fine judgement of border work, which is arguably not transmissible in writing anyway.

There is also an unresolved cultural tension. Some makers are open because they think a rising standard helps everyone. Others are guarded, partly to protect a livelihood and partly because of a genuine belief that the craft should be earned rather than downloaded. Both positions have been argued at length in the community for twenty years, and the ongoing legal dispute over the instrument’s design has not made anybody more relaxed about sharing.

See also: MAK-17, History, Rights and trademarks