How to Make The Perfect Foghorn

bonggam

Now that summer is here, fog may be the last thing you're thinking of -- but out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, summertime is when the fog rolls out to cover the Golden Gate Bridge and the city streets. To celebrate our foggy summer, here's a cool-sounding foghorn you can make with your kids as a summer craft. It's fun to make and fun to play!

Here's what you will need:



* a disposable rubber glove
* a plastic drinking straw
* a plastic water bottle
* a pair of scissors
* a rubber band
* masking tape or painter's tape

Here's how to assemble your foghorn:

Step 1: Use the scissors to snip a tiny hole in one of the glove's fingers. Cut a 2-inch piece of the drinking straw and insert into the hole. Secure the straw to the glove with tape.



Step 2: Use the scissors to cut off the bottom end of the plastic water bottle.


Step 3: Cover the top of the plastic water bottle with the rubber glove, and use the rubber band to secure the glove to the bottle. All done!

Your finished foghorn should look like this:


The foghorn at the bottom of the photo is your basic foghorn. The foghorn at the top of the photo will give a lower sound; we extended the tube by taping another plastic water bottle to the end of the first one.


To play the foghorn, hold the plastic bottle with the wide end (the end you cut off) facing up. Stretch the rubber glove tightly over the opening at the other end. Hold the plastic straw with your other hand and blow through the straw end. The rubber glove should inflate (again, make sure you stretch the glove over the plastic bottle opening tightly, to make sure no air escapes out the bottom), and you should hear a nice, low, moaning foghorn sound.


Have fun with your foghorn!

To hear how this foghorn sounds, go to Bonggamom's Foghorn post on her personal blog, Finding Bonggamom.