Adventures using joinery, carving, shaping, or structural fabrication. Includes everything from simple jigs to full mechanical assemblies with wooden linkages, frames, or housings.
Using Sonor singles as the design, we're ideating bass bars using 2" x 3/4" maple and salvaged organ pipes as resonator boxes.
These bass bars use wide maple tone bars coupled to short, sealed wooden resonators. Instead of tuning pipes to exact acoustic lengths, we scale the cross‑section to maintain strong low‑frequency response while keeping the resonators compact and workshop‑friendly. Bar widths and pipe bores graduate smoothly to maintain consistent timbre across the range.
Sometimes you have to rebuild wind chests! The one on the right is the original. You can see where some plywood chipped away making a full seat of the pallet valve impossible. On the left you can see the rebuilt chest all populated with pallet magnets.
After several different approaches, I think counter-boring the screw holes gives the best results. Here you can see the counter-bored bars on the left and the normal screw holes on the right.
And here's the device I just got to ensure a perfectly straight hole with consistent depth:
I acquired a bunch of pipes from the decommissioned organ from Trinity First Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. Most of the pipes are in such bad condition that I'm using them for lumber or other projects.
Information on this organ lives in the Pipe Organ List here: MNMplsTrinityFirstLutheran
This is a placeholder for the John Smith Busker Organ.
Plans available here: John Smith Organs - Busker
I was lucky to find this Thomas Orchestra Bells organ module on eBay, but I was unhappy with the condition of the case. I also wanted a glockenspiel to go with the street organ, so I rebuilt it and arranged the tone bars the same way as the melody pipes.
Making pipes was a learning experience for me -- settling on materials and construction methods, etc. I learned to just do it carefully according to instructions before experimenting with the design and construction. The folks who have made pipes historically, including John Smith, do things for reasons. They've gone through the trial and error so I might as well learn from them. In addition, it's really important to be careful and neat. Angles, dimensions, and joints all matter so slow down for precision.
I got this very cheap on eBay. It's clearly not very pretty, but all the bars are there. I salvaged the maple bars and built a whole new instrument for them.