More from the woodwork shop.

[Chris Hobson]

I thought that I would continue with the story of the wind organ project in a new post as the old thread was getting a bit long and was needing a lot of scrolling to get to the updates.

Picture 1. Jigs, no not lively Celtic dances but little frames to hold components together while glue sets. Top right is a little jig that I first made in order to attach the pads to the levers on the valves. I soon realised that doing the pieces one at a time would take forever. It also didn't hold the parts in position accurately enough. The sandwich style assembly with the four clamps, top left, is clamping the little leather pads onto the levers, one at each end so it is done in two stages. Rather than glueing fiddly little pieces on one at a time, I found it more efficient to glue the levers onto a strip of leather, bottom right, and then seperate and trim them with a modelling knife. The levers and pads are put together in two stages in batches of ten or eleven in the two jigs in the foreground.
Picture 2. The first eleven valves installed. The pads are now in a nice straight line. If you look at the picture on the earlier thread you can see that the pads are uneven and this wasn't really satisfactory.

 

[Chris Hobson]

Wife Liz went to the gym early today so we were both up at 05:00 this morning. This allowed me to put in an epic day of organ fettling. So now all of the valves are fixed and re-installed and the valve assembly screwed to the keyboard. The keys have all been levelled up and a little spot of superglue put on each of the adjusting screws. Tomorrow I am hoping to attach my workshop vacuum cleaner to it as an experiment to make sure that all the keys make a sound.

 

[SB2015]

Wife Liz went to the gym early today so we were both up at 05:00 this morning. This allowed me to put in an epic day of organ fettling. So now all of the valves are fixed and re-installed and the valve assembly screwed to the keyboard. The keys have all been levelled up and a little spot of superglue put on each of the adjusting screws. Tomorrow I am hoping to attach my workshop vacuum cleaner to it as an experiment to make sure that all the keys make a sound.

This must be such a rare skill. The local organ repair place sadly closed. So pleased to see that you are continuing this skill.

 

[Chris Hobson]

I'm not all that skilled, this job is well out of my comfort zone so I'm sort of winging it a bit. I have watched a lot of You Tube videos about renovating pianos. I have also been an engineer for my entire working life and I seem to have a talent for problem solving so that helps.

Edit.
I've had the vacuum cleaner crudely piped up to the keyboard assembly. Some of the keys are sticking slightly which is slightly disappointing as I went to quite a bit of trouble to make sure they were moving nice and freely. I thought that the springs felt quite soft so it's possible that they need tempering. Some of the reeds are failing to produce any sound so there is another job. The pressure in the wind chest is regulated by a kind of controlled air leak so I can't really do anymore on these problems until the pump assembly has been built, so that will be the next job.