I retrieved an old green table from the Fotopic office last week as there’s some spare furniture – this particular item has a bit of sentimental value in that it was varnished by my Mum and Dad, and spent quite a few years as our dining table when we lived in Eastmoor Road. Anyway, there’s no real place for it in our house but once the table top has been removed it’s a perfect size to mount the windchest! Hurrah!

So, er, once things get a bit more back to normal I shall start mounting pipes and electromagnets. Maybe some noise by end of September, assuming I’m not as laid up with work as I am now.

Since we were away for the weekend I spent an hour on Friday screwing the top on the windchest and sealing it with copious quantities of PVA, letting it dry over the course of Saturday and Sunday.

Come Sunday night I relaxed by connecting the blower up to the windchest, and putting the base on. This isn’t completely screwed in yet but I wanted to see if there was air leakage anywhere around the sealed part of the top. You can see in the photos that the connection isn’t great either but it served a purpose, highlighting the gaps I was aware of. In a really rather excellent turn of events, it appears that the top is now sealed on properly and there’s no escaping wind – hooray!

I’ve found that the 50mm mini fall-pipe is good for running from the blower and allows a very good seal on the connections, so I’ll be nipping to Wickes again sometime to pick up some joints I can stick together. Then it’s time to start thinking about the frame all this will stand on!

Next steps: sort the pipes into chromatic note order; set out the order on the top of the windchest and drill the wind holes; attach the pallet magnets and wire them up; mount on the base and try to knock a tune out of it!

This is a brief update since not much has happened in the past week owing to work taking over again, however:

• The blower arrived and works fine, it needs a 110VAC supply although this will not be a drawback in the first instance (I have a 240VAC-110VAC converter).
• I am in the process of sorting the sides on the windchest and assembling it although today’s the first chance I’ve had to complete it, and (sod’s law) I’ve run out of the relevant screws. Still, at least it’s been PVA-sealed so far.
• Next step is to build the windchest properly and plan the top, as well as sorting the (cadged metallic) pipework in chromatic note order and mark off which pipes are which (using the rather advanced technique of little stickers).
• Si has assisted by prodding the Arnold Laver woodyard people to get me some birch ply and some maple, the latter being especially useful on Wurlitzer band organ-derived pipes such as violins.

With the wind behind me (no pun intended) I should be able to get something making a noise by mid August. Whether that noise is tuneful or even remotely defined as ‘music’ will be another matter entirely.

I took delivery of a rank of Swell Principal 4ft the other day, and haven’t had chance to blog about it. They came from a church in Burton-on-Trent and were constructed in 1863. Photos here.

Windchest this weekend, probably.

A quick addendum to yesterday’s entries: I found a post on MMD which actually does detail preferred timber for use in organ pipes. This seems to be a bit of a trade secret (or maybe a black art!).There’s also a reply here on the pipe wall flexing subject.

Preferred materials I’ve discovered seem to be:

• Birch ply (at least one noted Dutch organ builder uses this)
• Sugar pine (I’m not sure ‘bog-standard pine’ is the same as ‘sugar pine’? Seems a bit soft…)
• Thick close-grained spruce
• Maple
• Redwood
• American cherry hardwood

Some seem to be reasonably available but I’ve no idea about alternatives (yet). Dammit I wish I’d paid more attention in CDT (though maybe Mr Preston didn’t teach us about that… I’d know definitively if I’d listened).

I’ve used MDF to make the mini voicing windchest but the shortening of tool life gives cause for concern. Also I’d have to seal anywhere which was a wind-way (I did this last night on the windchest using PVA at a 4:1 ratio, with a second coat again this morning – it’s very porous).

I’m off to Burton-on-Trent tomorrow evening to pick up a rank of Principal pipes from an organ builder down there who’s having a bit of a clear-out. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to pick his brains a bit.

A little bit of research has led me to this post detailing requirements of blowers on organs.

The “safe” calculation seems to be to allow 10cfm per rank. My (predicted) 8-rank DIY organ will require about 8WG to run the violin rank and the percussion motors I think, so I’m looking for a blower that will run 8WG at 80cfm. Let’s say 120cfm to allow for future running – better to slow it down than have it run out of puff!

B.O.B.Stevenson has a handy PDF on their site about blowers (from the Organ Builders’ Journal), and Alan Pell sells blowers too specifically for fairground organs (they’re bloody pricey to get wrong though). To eBay I think where things like this appear frequently, or maybe attempt to make one myself like John did with his “ChrisTina” organ.

It also leads me to believe that the mini blower I got via eBay (like this one) won’t have enough oomph to run a larger pipe. Bugger.

After a week of hard work I’d set aside today to build my first pipe – annoyingly I’ve been thwarted at almost every turn. But let’s backpedal a bit…

The plans for the John Smith Universal organ arrived, with many of the measurements in imperial (including a requirement for 1/8″ birch ply and 1/8″ MDF). There are two main obstacles to me building this thing: firstly my wonky cutting technique which was solved by purchasing a band-saw from ASK Tools in Birstall (Nicky says ‘if you lose three fingers it’s going back’). The second obstacle is sourcing the timber which I thought would be fairly simple.

Sadly, no…

B&Q, Wickes, Homebase all draw blanks as far as decent timber goes – it seems nobody really makes stuff nowadays. However, our local timber merchant who’s been there for years say on their website that they supply all sorts of timber including birch and MDF, and off I potter to their Wakefield branch to see. After wandering around on Friday lunchtime when they seemed woefully understaffed and not being able to find anyone to give me a hand, I left empty-handed but resolved to come back when they might be a bit less busy. Saturday 4pm seemed like a sensible time – lo, the woodyard was empty save for two staff fiddling with the emergency lights, and five minutes later one comes over to see what I need. The conversation goes a bit like this:

Me: “Hi, I’m after some 1/8″ MDF – 4mm would be fine.”
Him: “We don’t do it.”
Me: “Oh, OK. In which case, do you have any cherry hardwood please?”
Him: “We don’t do it.”
Me: “Not my day eh. OK, I also need some birch ply – 1/8″.”
Him: “We don’t do birch.”

That was the end of the conversation really. He wandered off without even suggesting alternatives (which the more mainstream places might have done). So, Howarth Timber? Rubbish nowadays it seems. Grandad Tomlinson (a proponent of Howarth for years) would be very annoyed.

There are other places to try: Google threw me to a birch ply specialist; eBay revealed a woodyard in Huddersfield which carry lots of interesting things in stock; the tool place where I bought the band-saw sell offcuts and pieces (not really great if you want to make a consistent rank of pipes though); Si’s asking at another woodyard for me. To be fair though I’ll perhaps end up using something reclaimed like an old door frame or something… anyone got any maple or oak kicking around…?

Meantime I have been trying to work out the maths for building pipes using various calculations. I’m not great at maths in the first place but I’ve set up an Excel spreadsheet to convert John Smith’s calculations to metric and extend the pipework calculations using 6mm MDF which is more readily available. I’m quite close to giving up on that approach though and working out pipe dimensions purely from scratch using wavelength, airflow and resonance calculations.

Finally, the main windchest. 4ft x 2ft, which makes it a standard size of MDF which at 8mm is thick enough and rigid enough. I’ve got all the bits for that but don’t want to start construction until I’ve completed the pipework experiments.

One silver lining: today I constructed a small test windchest running from a little steam blower which provides up to 4WG and will allow me to test whether my pipes sound, although the eventual unit will hopefully run more at 6WG or 8WG (sourcing an adequate blower concerns me but I’m sure I’ll find one which will be up to the job soon).

So, frankly, I’m frustrated. Nothing patience and time won’t solve, but it still means I’ve singularly failed to build a pipe today – my original aim.

Edit: Thanks to the reader who pointed me at Arnold Laver’s website. It would seem they do all the stuff I need and more besides, and there’s also a branch in Sheffield that opens at 10am on Sunday mornings. Might mosey on down there tomorrow for a look!

Meandering through the days since I decided to start building an organ, I’ve been having some thoughts and purchased some materials.

First off is the pipework. While I can comfortably expect old church organ pipes to come up on eBay (and in one case an entire pipe organ – yes she’d kill me) I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I’d need to construct my own pipework. There are a few tomes out there which detail construction, of which Eric Cockayne’s reference “The Fair Organ – How It Works” is the most expansive and covers a multitude of registers. Our local reference library had the self-same copy I took out in 1986 (it even had a small pencil mark of the date in my handwriting where I’d renewed it over the phone!) so that’s been quite a lot of use although not brilliant.

I’ve been contemplating the controller. The pallet magnets to allow wind entry/exit are a lot easier than constructing the more traditional pneumatic puff-motors and are readily available on eBay, when combining these with a MIDI unit I can control up to 64 of them. I won’t need that many keys of course but we’ll see how it goes – I’ve not quite decided on the departmental configuration yet.

I’ve also not been quite sure about the pressure involved in the windchest (that’s the bit that all the pipes sit on, and is usually pressurised with air from the blower). There’s quite a bit of advice around though which states that 8WG blows your socks off, whereas many organs seem to run around the 6WG level. Experimentation is called for especially since I’ve not decided on how the windchest is configured either. I’ve found a blower in Batley (about 5 miles from us) which I think will do the job and run from a car battery.

We wandered over to a vehicle rally in Thornes Park yesterday, where I picked up a cheap glue-gun and a bench-mounted circular saw for £buggerall. That solves my wonky cutting technique on the pipework

So in short, lots of ideas and no real cohesion. At this point enter the John Smith Universal Organ – or what turns out to be a set of plans and a DVD on constructing this little instrument which runs from paper roll music and is hand-cranked. I’m not really interested in the hand-cranked or paper roll aspect, although it does have a lot of measurements/construction/voicing/tuning guides for the pipework alongside all that pesky stuff about keeping pressure and building a reservoir using stuff like household chamois leathers! Result! That arrived earlier this week and I’ve been perusing the measurements and working out what I need to do about timber. First pipe by the end of next week hopefully, maybe mitering the bass the week after, and with any luck a set of old reed pipes will turn up on eBay before long.

I’m planning that the eventual unit will be approximately 4ft long by 3ft wide with a small undershelf for a MIDI filer and car battery (possibly next to the blower/reservoir), and mountable on a set of axles (probably old pram ones will do!). I can stick to this storage size if I make the endpieces into percussion departments (bass drum/cymbals on one size, snare on the other) which will fold in for storage/travel. The aim is that it can fit in the back of the Picasso with the seats down although I’m not overly optimistic of that.

I’m now missing: leather for the pneumatic work, tubing to carry the main wind supply, and a windchest design. The latter two need to be there before I can test and voice any pipework. I’ll have to have a think about that while wandering to Wales for a ‘do’, probably.

I have decided on the next project: building a fairground organ.

I’ve been interested in mechanical music for a long time – I used to build model fairground organs (an early model is shown here) and have always enjoyed pottering around steam rallies viewing the different mechanisms. I’m a Friend of the Mechanical Music Museum at Brentford, and indeed can probably bore you to tears on the main differences between an 88-key Limonaire keyframe and its Gavioli equivalent. It’s another facet in my nerd make-up really.

So, it began where all bad project ideas begin – after a few drinks. Browsing eBay I came across this chap who sells parts for building organs. One click led to another and I rediscovered the Fairground Organ Preservation Society – hurrah! Not only that, but also j-Omega Electronics who sell a rather interesting board which converts a MIDI signal into 64 individual note outputs. A trip to the library yielded a copy of Eric Cockayne’s reference book (I was pleasantly surprised to find this had been revised, even after Cockayne’s death – must source a copy of that).

I am now on the lookout for some pipes – 8′ stopped flute, 4′ piccolo, 8′ bourdon would all be useful but if you know of any please do yell. Although this project will probably go slower than the disco dancefloor since I need to buy quite a few items second-hand I am planning to build the windchest and air reservoir from scratch, so I want to plan and draft the design properly prior to construction. And of course I need to finish the DDF.

Expect more posts about this as time goes on and I come up with plans and ideas. Cheggers has to be the first tune out of it.