Family Organ: The Reed Assembly - Part 2

Pallets on Hold and Cleaning the Reeds

Last time I mumbled on and on about working the Underneath, and particularly the pallets. However, Johnson & Son, my felt supplier, appears to have gone on hiatus until after the new year, so there's limited work to be done on the pallets. I did make a pallet jig out of scrap wood to use when the felt comes in. The jig will allow me to place a sheet of properly-widthed felt in the right position, and will keep the pallets aligned as glue is applied and the pallets placed:

It can similarly be used to apply the hides over the felts.

With that done, I wait until the appropriate felt comes in, which will be at least a week or two.

The Reeds

Being stymied by the lack of felt doesn't mean there isn't more that can be done. The reeds need to be cleaned. With 49 keys,and two reeds per key, that means 98 reeds will be cleaned. Sigh.

The rear reeds

The reeds are heavily tarnished, and a few have corrosion. The tarnish isn't so much of a concern, but cleaner is better, and the corrosion should be removed. The reeds are somewhat fragile, especially the smaller ones, so the question is how to to effect the clean-up so as to not end up with a pile of scrap brass for your troubles. 

My first strategy was to go with Brasso and a cloth wheel on the Dremel at the lowest speed setting. On the plus side, this was quite effective and resulted in shiny reeds - for the few that were done. The downside is that Brasso is a liquid, so you wind up with Brasso coating your workbench, clothing, face, hair, workshop, and in low-Earth orbit for all I know. 

After a bit of washing up, I consulted THE BOOK. It recommended soaking the reeds in toilet bowl cleaner and then a rubbing with 0000 steel wool. For this approach a commando raid was required; waiting until the wife was otherwise engaged, I pilfered one of her baking dishes and headed for the workshop. Half of the reeds were sent to the blue deep.

A couple of words about this approach. Toilet bowl cleaner has a scent that starts out tolerable enough, but eventually becomes cloying, almost gaggingly so. The plastic wrap over the baking dish helps only marginally. Still, some allowances must be made in the name of progress.

 The other thing is that this stuff is caustic (hence the reason it works, I suppose) and slippery, which requires one to be quite cautious during the "rubbing with steel wool" phase. The larger reeds are quite happy to fling droplets of cleaner onto your face, and the smaller reeds are quite happy to fling their cleaner-coated selves onto your face, workbench, or floor. Fragile they may be, but they also seem to possess a certain suicide-inspired aggressiveness that turns them into daredevils, or perhaps just devils. 

Still, this approach works well enough, though you don't quite wind up with new-penny shininess. Half of the reeds are done, and the other half are currently soaking in their little spa.

Thinking about Reassembly

Casting about for more that could be done now, it occurred to me that it might be time to consider how to put the whole disorganized mess together to make a playable organ. I had numbered the keys and stored them in a box, and set aside various other mysterious parts in one section of workshop, but the organ was dismantled a couple of years ago. My memory is hazy under the best of circumstances, so events that took place a couple of years ago may as well be categorized as "mythology". I had taken some pictures during disassembly with the idea that the pictures would be helpful during reassembly. Undoubtedly they would be helpful - I sure wish I knew where they were.

One starts with what is known and proceeds from there. I knew that the keys went on the reed action (what I had previously referred to as the "reed assembly" before being enlightened by THE BOOK), and that they were numbered, so they could be easily placed. With those in place, along with the front knee levers, the rest of the pieces fell into place fairly quickly.

Difficult to see from the above picture, but I was able to get the keys, mutes, levers, volume control, and linkages - basically all of the really organy parts -  in place and loosely connected. Hurrah!

This turned out to be a useful exercise for a number of reasons. Firstly, it convinced me that I WOULD be able to get the damn thing back together again. That had been sort of a nagging doubt before today. Secondly, it provided some clarity about areas that need to be re-felted. Most of this was pretty well understood before today, but less clear were the places where the felt had been significantly eaten. The clarity comes from seeing where moving pieces come together and need to be muffled. One doesn't want a lot of clunking and thumping to detract from the (ahem) purity of the melodies.

Lastly, it showed me that the organ has a volume control. Who knew??? It is controlled by the knee lever on the right, which opens a panel over the rear reeds. The knee lever on the left controls the mutes on the front reeds (under normal playing only the rear reeds are heard). One can use the volume control to get some moderate increase in volume from the rear reeds, and open the front mutes to get all the reeds going in a thermonuclear cacophony. Dogs will howl!

The Keys

An observation about the keys: They are, happily, in really nice shape. Only one key has a small chip in the front, the rest appear to be entirely sound. The white keys have yellowed over time, and that's how they will stay, but I will clean them up a bit and rub them with 0000 steel wool to make them delightfully smooth.

Cleaned White Keys

The black keys could be repainted, but I'm going to hold off on that for the time being. Plenty of time to guild the lily after the organ is playable.