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I just wonder if in what appears to be a slow collapse of the new Organ Market should some thought be given to preserving the best older home Organs rather than the play and then trash attitude, surely some are worthy of spending time and money on assuming the parts can be remanufactured. People even spend money restoring Austin Allegros, surely many an old Organ is a more worthy recipeant of some hard earned cash than that :D.
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Many of the organs that are most maintainable are older, basic, analog models that are not really comparable with what today's technology can offer. They could be maintained almost in perpetuity, but with modest results musically speaking. The more advanced, better-sounding instruments tend to have many critical parts that are hard or impossible to replace or substitute. Especially custom integrated circuits, for which there is little prospect of having them remade or even simulated, because of the sheer amount of technology involved. These make the whole thing look like a poor investment; what is the point of spending lots of time and effort on something that might go 'pop' at any moment?
Hence, until the present glut of used organs dries up, the incentive to get entrenched with a particular instrument or model, other than the timeless classics that already have a value, is virtually nil. A selection of decent consoles will survive to be re-purposed for a VPO, as the last of the best start climbing the end of the bathtub curve of reliability. This creates an external pressure working against the restoration approach, because a faulty but original instrument can be worth more as parts than in its complete form.
In a nutshell, the prospect for survival of a lot of instruments, once their maintenance honeymoon is over, is pretty bleak.
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