Manufacture of High Quality Musical Steel Drums in Trinidad and Tobago

This paper explores innovative manufacturing processes, which can be used to manufacture the national musical instrument of Trinidad and Tobago, the Musical Steel Drum or Steel Pan. The main manufacturing process used today is the manual hand-forming technique. In order to achieve more consistent and deeper formed components while maintaining the high quality of the instrument, it is proposed that the Marforming process and the Flow-forming process, an adaptation of the Spinforming process, be used more frequently in the future to replace the traditional Hand-forming method. In the traditional Spinforming technique material is pushed from the outer circumference of the metal disc to the center in progressive passes of the former. This results in a thinning of the outer region of the formed component with thickening of the center, however the opposite is required for the musical steel drum and by adapting the process the required strain distributions were achieved. Evaluation took the form of strain analyses of pre-formed steel drums and visual inspection of the quality of the surface finish. It was found that the Marformed components had the smallest range of strain values while the Spinformed components had the largest range.