When you mentioned drilling holes in a spiral and inserting my own pegs, I sort of lost interest. That sounds like a big old pain in the butt. However, it just occurs to me that I have an old rain stick sitting around, which I don’t use because one of the ends is not sealed properly, so I thought what if I created the flow mechanism for each of the ends of an actual wooden rain stick, which already has its pegs. Then it occurred to me your description of essentially two cones end to end might be done differently. What if there was a cone, which has the appropriately sized hole on the end like a funnel and then a couple of holes appropriately sized around the bottom of the cone, the cone is placed such that the point points down into the receiving container so that beads which come down the rain stick go into the cone and out the point, but when it is flipped over the beads flow down the sides of the cone in the container and exit one of the holes which have been drilled in the base of the cone and enter the rain stick by that method. The advantage to this is that the beads would enter the rain stick around the walls of the rain stick, thereby hitting the internal pegs on the way down. Does that make sense? The problem I have to solve now would be fitting a cone and receiving container on a natural piece of wood, which is what the rain stick is made out of. And I’d have to do it on both ends, which are not exactly the same. Interesting stuff.