New Lungs!

Although the organ has been making a lot of music since first coming alive last July, it was clear that the two blowers that were powering the organ did not output enough wind. As a general rule of thumb, you want to design your static pressure with at least two inches of water column higher than your highest regulated pressure. In this instrument's case, the Tuba is on 15". The two original blowers output 12" and 16" of water column.

Though Mark Herman, a new 10 h.p. blower was acquired for the instrument. We just had to drive an hour south of Minneapolis, in the middle of corn fields to get it! The fans were in rusty shape but cleaned up well with a chemical treatment and a lot of scrubbing.

There are two 10" wind lines that come out of the blower room and go to the chamber. The previous two blowers each output into their own baffle box and then out to one of the feed pipes. A new baffle box (to quiet the wind noise down) was constructed and installed, connecting both lines together.

The last challenge was on the power side of things... the existing VFDs were not rated for a 10 horse motor, so a new ABB drive was acquired and installed to control the much larger motor.

Now that the new blower is in place and outputting 19.5" of water column, I realized how under-winded the organ was! It seems like a new instrument to me and I look forward to sharing it during the ATOS convention next month!