Physics

I was thinking that if I mounted the bonker mechanism directly on the resonator pipe, the hammer shaft would need to be pretty long to accommodate most of them.  So I came up with the idea of a hammer arm pivoting on risers that straddle the tone bar.  I'd have to engineer the actuator, but the possibilities are pretty vast.

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.

½" CPVC is practically perfect for prototyping a reed-based bass system—and with your pile of fittings, you can iterate insanely fast.

Let’s turn that into concrete, buildable ideas.

🎯 Why ½" CPVC is a gift here

Think of it like:

subwoofer (bourdon) + midrange driver (reed)

🔧 Practical system architecture

Here’s a clean setup you can actually build:

✅ 2. Multi-rank chorus bass (this gets exciting fast)

You said you have 4–5 ranks.

Instead of one:

Layer them.

Voicing ideas:

A. Unison stack

• 2–3 reeds per note
• Slightly detuned

Result:

🔥 huge, chorused bass (accordion-from-hell energy)

🔧 The key you may be missing: resonators

Reed organ reeds alone:

• make a thin, buzzy tone
• don’t project well

Add resonators:

and they become full, organ-grade bass voices