Repairing, refurbishing, or modernizing vintage instruments, mechanisms, or contraptions. Focuses on bringing old hardware back to life while preserving original character and function.
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 acquired several pipes from this historic organ. The organ is still alive and well and resides at the Henry Ford Residence in Dearborn, MI. Here's details about the organ: Opus 1318 - Henry Ford Residence, Dearborn, MI
The whole house as well as the organ has undergone a massive restoration, resulting in replacing a good number of the pipes.
These are views of the Thomas Orchestra Bells as I received the instrument. I was disappointed by the synthetic casework, but discussing it with other folks it made sense for a mass-produced object from Thomas Organ Company. The design is super simple with a row of solenoids below the tone bars. It didn't use return springs, relying on gravity to drop the striker back into the coil.
I have a full set of Rohr Schalmei pipes that I purchased locally. They have a lovely sound, but I borked a bunch of them fitting them into my Topsy organ. Here's some notes about these pipes and how to fix them.
A Rohr Schalmei rank is one of the hardest reed‑flue hybrids to regulate because it combines:
• a flue pipe body (like a Rohrflöte)
• a reed‑pipe reed (like a Schalmei)
• a chimney / rohr that radically affects tuning and speech
• a very narrow voicing window
Here's a series of tech articles on special organ pipes -- reed pipes, vox pipes, etc -- and how to make and/or tame them.
It is fascinating — and the deeper you go into these oddball pipes, the more you realize that organ builders were doing acoustic hacking long before we had the vocabulary for it. What you’ve stumbled into with those salvaged “saxophone” and “clarinet” pipes is basically the secret experimental branch of flue‑pipe voicing.
And the fact that you already have examples in your hands means you’re sitting on a toolkit of techniques that most builders never get to see up close.
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🎯 Why these pipes matter
They prove something that textbooks barely mention:
Ahh — you’ve got some of the really weird ones.
Those “saxophone” and “clarinet” wooden flue pipes with internal wooden obstructions are part of a small, fascinating family of formant‑shaping flue pipes that behave almost like reed pipes without actually using a reed.
They are exactly the missing link between:
• a normal flue pipe
• a violin pipe with a frein harmonique
• and a pseudo‑Vox‑Humana flue pipe
…and they tell us something very important:
Can we fabricate a pipe that sounds like a vox humana pipe using wood?
A Vox Humana is not just a “pipe shape”—it’s a reed stop, meaning the sound comes from a vibrating brass reed and shallot, with the wooden resonator acting as a short, carefully‑scaled acoustic amplifier. The sources we have describe the resonator geometry, materials, and historical variations, but they do not give a single universal recipe—because historically, builders experimented endlessly with shapes, tapers, and cavities. Springer +1
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🪵 1. What makes a Vox Humana resonator special
Sources emphasize that Vox Humana pipes vary more than almost any other reed stop—over 10 distinct resonator types appear in historical organs. Springer +1
Common traits:
• Very short resonators (often ⅛–¼ wavelength of the pitch)
• Cylindrical or conical (regular or inverted)
• Open, stopped, or half‑stopped
• Sometimes include a hole, hood, or vowel cavity
• Often narrower than Trumpet/Oboe resonators
• Designed to emphasize formant‑like peaks (the “human voice” illusion)
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This is a list tasks and experiments to figure out what to do with that cranked bellows box.