Adventures using joinery, carving, shaping, or structural fabrication. Includes everything from simple jigs to full mechanical assemblies with wooden linkages, frames, or housings.
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
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.
One of the early iterations. I tried suspending the bars above the resonator box with wire, as an "improvement" to the string suspension it had originally. I learned a whole bunch from this experiment, including the idea that I painted myself into a corner laying the bars out with so little room between them. I was building the frame from scratch so there was no reason to try to squish it all together.
Here's an initial assembly of the instrument with its resonator box suspended between plywood boards.
These are the dimensions of Topsy's case.
This is my street organ, based off of plans for the John Smith Topsy 3. It's not pretty, but it works!
I started work on this contraption November 2022. The construction has been an adventure in and of itself.
I copied my Deagan orchestrion xylophone's resonator box hoping to get a good sound out of these bars and took no account for the correct nodes on the bars. The box is made mainly out of salvaged organ pipe lumber.