My name is Tom Dimock, and I have a mostly not working Austin organ as part of my house. I probably come to pipe organs from a rather different direction than most here - neither my wife nor I play the organ nor have any real intention of learning! This begins to make a little more sense if you know that I re-built player pianos for a number of years and had a general fascination with automatic musical instruments.
The idea of having a player pipe organ grew slowly, and finally got to the point of adding an appropriate room onto the house. But I still had no organ. Larry Chace had in the meantime moved to Ithaca nad we becam acquainted through work. Needless to say, he encouraged my desire to have an organ, and introduced me to Cullie Mower, a pipe organ heavyweight who maintains many of the organs in this area.
One day Cullie called and said that he might have found me an organ. He gave me the preliminary measurements, and I didn't hold out much hope, as the main walk-in chest was about 8" too large for the room. :-( But I took a day off work and we went to check out the organ. He had measured wrong! It would just fit! This gave rise to a pretty funny event the next day when my boss asked where I had been and I replied that "I had to take the day off to measure my organ - to my great relief it was 8" shorter than I thought!".
The organ was not at all original, having been the victim of much well intentioned "improvement" over the years, and besides, I wouldn't be getting all of the pipework, as Cullie needed some of it for a project he was engaged in. But I would get the swell and great chests, the blower, the reservoirs, and a lot of pipework, including the 16' open diapason. We moved it into my piperoom, and the main chest fit with slightly over 1" to spare, and the swell fit into the side alcove of the room with less than 3/8" to spare. I could not have built the room to a better fit. Fate?
Well, to make a long story a little shorter, the organ did play on the swell and several unit chests, using MIDI equipment designed and fabricated by Larry and me. One of the reasons that the pipe organ was available was that one of its "improvements" had been a complete replacement of its pneumatics with - shudder - perflex. This has continued to deteriorate, and now the swell no longer plays, so all that is working are a few all-electric unit chests.
And thus it has stood for the last several years. We keep talking about getting going on the perflex replacement job - yes, I've done some and know I can do it - but other projects keep getting higher priority. Maybe when I retire in four years, if not before. Or maybe I'll win the lottery and can afford to farm out the more horrible parts of the job (and just buy a full new set of pneumatics from Austin).
I'm here on the list mostly to lurk and maybe get up some more enthusiasm for diving back into the project. We'll see.
Oh, and the other organ project, which Larry can probably give a much more complete description of, is the restoration of the derelict theatre organ in a theatre in Ithaca. But its condition makes mine look good. Sigh.....
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