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(This thread is part of a larger project described in this thread).
I have recently moved most of my old home pipe organ from storage (at three different locations!) to my current home where I intend to rebuild and expand it into a large hybrid organ (as discussed in abovementioned thread). I thought people might find it interesting if I share this particular part, so here goes.
This organ was built in 1989 by the South African Organ Builders (SAOB). Many such house organs were built by SAOB for use as house organs or practice room organs at music schools/universities. This is what the organ looked like before was disassembled and moved to storage:
This thread is specifically aimed at the windchest of this organ. Although I had quite a good idea of how the internals of the windchests work (or so I thought!), I had to open the chest and see it for myself. Due to the new layout planned for the organ and the room it will be placed in at our house, I will have to redesign the entire windchest in any case. I also plan on reusing as much as possible from the original chest (especially the electromagnets), so I just started to carefully disassemble the windchest in phases.
The organ has only 2 ranks - a diapason and a flute rank, from which units are derived up to 1' pitch. The entire wooden part of the chest measures 1440 x 440 x 120 mm. Here the chest can be seen from both sides:
Zooming in a little bit, one can see that the chest mostly contains direct action magnets, with a few electro-pneumatic action magnets for the bottom octave of the 8' Bourdon and the façade diapason pipes. All the magnets seem to be Kimber-Allen magnets and are still in very good condition:
Removing the toe boards from the chest reveals that a sheet of brown paper is used to seal the internals of the chest. There was a little bit of damage to the paper due to one of the toe board screws that were placed too far from the edge. Interestingly, the gasket on the edge of that particular toe board still made an air-tight seal and never seemed to be an issue. Given that the paper was already damaged and that I will be disassembling the chest in any case, I carefully removed some of the paper to see how the internals of the chest work. I must admit, nothing beats seeing the “real thing” up close and personal in order to fully grasp how it actually works. This also gave me even more appreciation and respect for the work that organ builders do. Here are a few photos of the inside:
Here (on the left) the “ventil puffers” can also be seen together with the E-P magnets:
All the pipes still need to be carefully removed from the crate and inspected for dents and any other possible forms of damage. Each individual pipe (148 in total) will then be measured and documented so that they can be drawn in CAD software to assist with designing the new layout.
The redesign of the chest will mainly entail splitting the entire chest in two so that the console can be placed in the middle. The reason for this is I have a lovely 3.5 meter wall in our living room to my disposal for the organ, but the catch is that the available depth for the organ pipes and other internals is only about 0.5 meter (not taking into account the console, though). Playing a bit with the façade and bringing some of the façade pipes more to the front (as in the middle of the original façade design, just above the music rack) can possibly gain a couple of extra centimeters in depth. The ceiling is also only about 2.8 m high, so there is not too much height to play around with as well.
The split of the chest will either be a C/C# split or split by rank. However, I also plan to add an 8' string stop (Salicional/Gamba) to the organ as well, so there will be a few things to consider in the final decision regarding the split. A C/C# split might be a bit awkward for the organist and listeners sitting very close to the organ, but the seating in the room will be at least 1.5-2 meters from the pipes, with the furthest point in the room almost 5 meters away from the pipes. So I am in a bit of a mental wrestle to decide which split configuration for the chest will be the best option. Perhaps some comments from others on this could provide some better insight into this?
Coming back to the project in general... I absolutely love to read other people's projects on this forum. I have also learned a lot by just reading up what other people did and commented. Those things are major driving and motivational forces for me to tackle this ambitious project. Therefore, I will be sharing all developments as I make progress in this project.
I sincerely hope that many will find this posting (and future ones) interesting and enjoyable. Any comments are also very welcome, as I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this.
I have recently moved most of my old home pipe organ from storage (at three different locations!) to my current home where I intend to rebuild and expand it into a large hybrid organ (as discussed in abovementioned thread). I thought people might find it interesting if I share this particular part, so here goes.
This organ was built in 1989 by the South African Organ Builders (SAOB). Many such house organs were built by SAOB for use as house organs or practice room organs at music schools/universities. This is what the organ looked like before was disassembled and moved to storage:
This thread is specifically aimed at the windchest of this organ. Although I had quite a good idea of how the internals of the windchests work (or so I thought!), I had to open the chest and see it for myself. Due to the new layout planned for the organ and the room it will be placed in at our house, I will have to redesign the entire windchest in any case. I also plan on reusing as much as possible from the original chest (especially the electromagnets), so I just started to carefully disassemble the windchest in phases.
The organ has only 2 ranks - a diapason and a flute rank, from which units are derived up to 1' pitch. The entire wooden part of the chest measures 1440 x 440 x 120 mm. Here the chest can be seen from both sides:
Zooming in a little bit, one can see that the chest mostly contains direct action magnets, with a few electro-pneumatic action magnets for the bottom octave of the 8' Bourdon and the façade diapason pipes. All the magnets seem to be Kimber-Allen magnets and are still in very good condition:
Removing the toe boards from the chest reveals that a sheet of brown paper is used to seal the internals of the chest. There was a little bit of damage to the paper due to one of the toe board screws that were placed too far from the edge. Interestingly, the gasket on the edge of that particular toe board still made an air-tight seal and never seemed to be an issue. Given that the paper was already damaged and that I will be disassembling the chest in any case, I carefully removed some of the paper to see how the internals of the chest work. I must admit, nothing beats seeing the “real thing” up close and personal in order to fully grasp how it actually works. This also gave me even more appreciation and respect for the work that organ builders do. Here are a few photos of the inside:
Here (on the left) the “ventil puffers” can also be seen together with the E-P magnets:
All the pipes still need to be carefully removed from the crate and inspected for dents and any other possible forms of damage. Each individual pipe (148 in total) will then be measured and documented so that they can be drawn in CAD software to assist with designing the new layout.
The redesign of the chest will mainly entail splitting the entire chest in two so that the console can be placed in the middle. The reason for this is I have a lovely 3.5 meter wall in our living room to my disposal for the organ, but the catch is that the available depth for the organ pipes and other internals is only about 0.5 meter (not taking into account the console, though). Playing a bit with the façade and bringing some of the façade pipes more to the front (as in the middle of the original façade design, just above the music rack) can possibly gain a couple of extra centimeters in depth. The ceiling is also only about 2.8 m high, so there is not too much height to play around with as well.
The split of the chest will either be a C/C# split or split by rank. However, I also plan to add an 8' string stop (Salicional/Gamba) to the organ as well, so there will be a few things to consider in the final decision regarding the split. A C/C# split might be a bit awkward for the organist and listeners sitting very close to the organ, but the seating in the room will be at least 1.5-2 meters from the pipes, with the furthest point in the room almost 5 meters away from the pipes. So I am in a bit of a mental wrestle to decide which split configuration for the chest will be the best option. Perhaps some comments from others on this could provide some better insight into this?
Coming back to the project in general... I absolutely love to read other people's projects on this forum. I have also learned a lot by just reading up what other people did and commented. Those things are major driving and motivational forces for me to tackle this ambitious project. Therefore, I will be sharing all developments as I make progress in this project.
I sincerely hope that many will find this posting (and future ones) interesting and enjoyable. Any comments are also very welcome, as I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this.