Organ Update - June 2022

Much progress has been made since the last update! Thanks to help from Zach Frame, all of the manual chests are now placed and mounted to the floor. This required measuring the dowel holes in the chests so that matching dowels could be drilled and tapped into place so that the chests could be simply set down on the chest bearers. All of the legs needed to be cut down due to ceiling height restrictions. Due to adding new poplar boards alongside the original 1928 boards, die had to be added to the amber shellac in order to make it darker than it comes out of the can. This dyed mixture was then sprayed on the boards in a variety of layers. At the end of the day, most reservoirs were placed, chests mounted, marimba harp mounted and the chime action mounted on top of the marimba. It was a long day but finally there was more visible progress in the chamber. To assist with the placement of the chests, all of the bottom boards were removed to shed weight. Since that very productive day, I have been doing little aside from putting amphenol ends on each bottom board. These cables carry all of the magnet wire, spare wire and ground returns back to the relay boards. If one bottom board needed to be serviced, it could be unplugged, dropped and moved to the well-lit work bench for service.

I’d like to thank John Cornue for lending his amphenol crimper to me for installing ends. It is an incredibly tedious process that takes me about 30 minutes to complete, per board. For reference, I have included some photos of the crimping process.

Finally, the surf was installed on the marimba and the shuffle (referred to as a sand block on this organ) is getting rebuilt (came in pieces). As of the time of writing, the shuffle is completely reassembled minus the valve assembly which was missing.