A week on the tools - including a nice little job with a puzzle for you

[Lucien Nunes]

Well it's not often that I get to do a solid week of electrical work these days. Most of my time is office/lab/workshop based, in the field it's mostly electronics. But last week I did Monday to Saturday, six days and two nights, about 100 hours of non-stop-sparking. The main job saw the core team of four of us back together that first worked as a unit doing theatre installations back in the 90s: Richard, Steve, Jason and myself. Anyway I digress, it's not this I wanted to talk about, it's the overnight job.

An old piece of kit on our round (we've got a lot of those) still working but in need of maintenance and in our sights for safety improvements. Not sure when it was installed, I think it's early 1930s but just possibly 20s as it is part of something that was installed in 1925. Peter and I had originally planned to overhaul this unit and upgrade its safety features while replacing the very ramshackle wiring to it that has been modified over the years. However, for various reasons, we decided it was better to decommission it and leave it in situ as a museum piece, and fit a new one alongside. This we tried to do last week but one component on the replacement was damaged in transit so we have to return there tonight to complete.

Let's begin with a pic of a little bit of the inside. I made a video of it before disconnection and this will be online in due course. If you are lucky you will also get to see the whole machine in operation, which is is fine working order. The pink bit is me, pointing out the accumulated wear from 85 years of use.

 

[SparkyChick]

They need to be, they can use huge volumes of air.

Pipe organs are just awesome pieces of engineering, and working on them was one of the best things I've ever done. Removing an old tracker (I think that's the right term for a purely mechanical linkage from console to wind chest) was one of the saddest, but many of the larger pipes got a new life as a pedal rank for a small village church organ so it wasn't all bad.

 

[Lucien Nunes]

These organs, designed to play music of many genres, have a lot of orchestrally voiced stops over and above the 'traditional' organ tones, some of which require mugh higher wind pressures. They also use what is termed 'extension', which allows each rank of pipes to do the work of two or three in a church organ by sounding more pipes per rank that the organist has fingers, so the wind volume consumed is higher as well as the pressure. A modest-size cinema organ therefore needs a blower more powerful than a very large church organ, which is more likely to be in the 3-5hp range. The very largest instruments sometimes have multiple blowers, the largest single blowers in the really colossal instruments are in the order of 100hp although these tend to be over-specced and rarely run anywhere near that load. Southampton is very well matched to its wind load and does perfectly with 17.5hp what a USA builder might have specced nearer 30hp.

 

[SparkyChick]

All I can say, is if you're ever in my part of the world working on one, I'd love to come along and take a look

 

[DPG]

All interesting stuff. There's a fairground museum on the east Yorkshire coast called 'The Scarborough Fair Collection'. They've got a few wagon mounted pipe organs there, along with various old fairground rides. Including a nice set of old dodgems. The good thing is most things are up and running and you can go on them which is nice. And they've got a working cakewalk. Some nice paintwork. Great place - worth a visit.
Of course, all you southerners will need a passport to visit yorkshire And I will personally check you over.

 

[SparkyChick]

Used to go to Scarborough on hols as a kid. Hire one of the beach huts for a week and try and ride the funicular near the Spa as many times as we could

Do Midlanders (with honorary Welsh status) require passports? I didn't the last time I went to Sheffield to see the fire service, but that was official business