Woodworking.

[Chris Hobson]

Being a retired person, I've been planning doing some kind of woodwork project for a while. My workshop was in a bit of a state so that has been a starting point. So, I've got rid of a lot of junk and sorted out which bits of wood might be useful and taken the rest to the tip. Repaired a broken shelving unit, fitted a new router to the router table and made some new drawers to keep all of the bits and accessories in. Lastly I've installed much better lighting. Equipment wise I have a table saw, mitre saw, router table, band saw, two drill presses, two bench grinders, thickness planer and a variety of hand held power tools.

I have in my possession the insides of an old pedal operated reed organ. The bellows are totally shot, the keys are rather brown and chipped and quite a few of them stick. However, some time ago as an experiment, I bought two very cheap hair dryers, took out the heating elements and mounted them to the wind chest to provide some wind and managed to get a tune out of it. So my project is to design and build a case to contain the keyboard, the reed section, and a rank of stopped flutes. The flutes will be made from black plastic conduit. There will also be a tremolo unit. There are 61 keys so I will probably build several jigs so that the flutes can be sort of mass produced. I currently have one flute that I made as an experiment just to make sure that I could make one that actually produces a sound. The wind chests and the case will be made from plywood. I'm intending to use softwood for the internal construction and oak for the parts that are visible. The wind will be provided by an extractor fan, mounted so that it's blowing inwards obviously. I have already bought the new key tops, I suspect that removing the old ones will be the hard part of installing them. Hopefully I will be able to provide updates as work progresses possibly with photographs.

 

[stephenS50]

I remember doing woodwork in my old school.All my friends found it so boring buy I rather enjoy it.

 

[Chris Hobson]

At school I preferred metalwork, I went on to be an engineer. Moving into my own house meant that I had to learn the basics of shelves, door hanging and fitted cupboards. I became much more interested after watching The New Yankee Workshop on the telly. My wife bought me a couple of books based on the series and I made some of the projects in it. The organ project is a mixture of woodwork and engineering so it should suit me well.

 

[Chris Hobson]

Thinking back, school woodwork classes were a bit dull. They tended to involve woodworking techniques that were from the dark ages and progressed at a snails pace so that it took several months to produce a tie rack. There was the time when the woodwork teacher left the room for a moment and a mate decided that it would be great fun to stuff wood shavings down the front of my jumper. I responded with a wood shaving retaliation so we were in the middle of a full on wood shaving fight when the teacher came back in. We each received a whack with a specially made spanking bat, it was the woodwork shop after all.

 

[Chris Hobson]

Here is my starting point for the organ building project. At the top is the old base board with the two hairdryer fans in it. I had hoped to use them to test the unit and to see how close to concert pitch the reeds were but when I plugged them in they blew the fuse. Checking them with a meter showed that they had zero resistance. The extractor fan, bottom left, proved to be too feeble for the job but I did manage to get enough sound to compare the pitch to the digital piano. The reed organ is about a quarter tone sharp. To the right of the fan is a stopped flute that I made as an experiment. The object bottom right is the power unit from an old Dyson vacuum cleaner. I got the organ to work using my workshop vacuum as a blower so I had a light bulb moment about the vacuum in the loft. The unit is quite noisy so I will have to engineer some kind of sound deadening system for it.

 

[Chris Hobson]

More pictures:

Top:
Replacement key tops. Obviously not ivory, they are made from acrylic resin, a posh name for plastic.
Next:
The keyboard as it is now. A lot of the keys are sticking, the key tops are yellow and chipped. Quite a few of the keys have splits which I have been repairing with glue.
Next:
The underside of the keyboard showing the reeds. One of the reeds has been replaced at some time in the past.
Bottom:
Close up of the Dyson power unit.