Farewell Kylomatic (Interstitial Rolling Method)
It might be obvious by now but there is more to a Halo than meets the eye — watch it come to life in our workshop.
If you watch closely, there’s a brief moment in the video (4m11s) where you see our interstitial rolling method… It’s done by a machine we made that Lino Schraudolph and the late Jim Dusin dubbed “Kylomatic”.
(I always cringed at that name but, like when I coined the term “handpan”, once it stuck it became irreplaceable)
Kylomatic was very helpful and achieved its purpose for 5 long years. But there’s something I’ve come to realize since we began making the Halo+ (which we cannot use ‘Kylo’ for). It’s that I’m actually doing better work without it… The old school hand-hammering process of coaxing the notes out of their concave graves is showing me new things I haven’t had to pay attention to for years. And I feel like the results are worth the extra time and effort.
I invested well over $100,000 (in parts and materials alone) to make this machine and now it appears it’ll become obsolete. It’s our crowning achievement, tech-wise at least, and it brought a few talented and smart guys together to make it. But if we can do better work without it that’s all that matters… though it was a worthy venture nonetheless.
We’re making fewer Halos these days, but better ones in my opinion. Less but better, as they say.
There’s also another big project we’ve been working on since we began hydroforming back in 2016 to make Halos more efficiently. And by “more efficiently” I mean more comfortably for us who make them. It’s a smart process, but I’m currently leaning towards scrapping it… at least for now.
Hand shaping the notes and the steel in-between them is exhausting and somewhat damaging to the body but I’m really enjoying this new phase of discovery… or shall I say rediscovery. So, I think we’ll hang out here for awhile.
