Glowing the shells of the Pantam – #4

It this blog post, which is the fourth in our “how to build a Pantam” series, I will guide you through the basics of how to glue the shells of the Pantam.
If you didn’t read our first, second, and third chapters in the series, then now is a perfect time.

Now we are ready to glue our shells!
But wait… what’s missing? Oh yes! The bottom shell!
Same as the top shell, first we need to sink our flat sheet with a hammer until it is a shell. Then we need to make the port or ‘gu’ in the shell, to create an acoustic chamber which we will also use in the final tuning process after the shells are glued.

How do we make the port

First we will cut a small hole in the middle of the shell, around 6 cm wide. Then we will glue a pipe of about 8 cm from inside the shell around the freshly cut hole and hammer from the outside the ‘lips’ of the steel around the port to bend it inside the pipe to form kind of a ‘tunnel’ in the shell.

So now that we have both shells ready to be glued it’s time to glue them!
There are many kinds of glues which we can use to glue our handpan, I recommend Merbenit HS60, this glue has been used by many makers for years and has a good reputation for holding up for many years.
I recommend leaving the glue for about 7 days with clamps holding the two rims of our shells together.