Making a Wooden Pipe Organ

The making of a 42 note wooden pipe organ (range: C3 - F6 with a rank of Bourdon 4' pipes) with walnut and maple key tops and other mostly at-hand materials for the rest of the components, such as an old cabinet for the keyboard frame, leftover screws and spring steel from a scraper for the valves, paperclips for the key-to-valve links, and plastic irrigation tubing to connect the pipes to the windchest holes.

The design elements of this organ are a mixture of a variety of other organ designs. I wanted to create an organ with pipes sitting atop the organ for both aesthetics and sound quality but wanted to avoid using a tracker-style roller board to convey the action of the keys to the windchest as I felt it would be too complicated for a simple 1 rank organ. Because of this, I decided to create a variation on Matthias Wandel's organ windchest design by creating valves that stayed in place with a screw and were directly above each key, requiring only a simple linear key-to-valve linkage. Taking inspiration from more classical organ designs (specifically, what was described in Mark Wick's "Organ Building for Amateurs"), I decided to create a foot-pumped bellows to supply wind for the organ, replacing the sound of an electric blower with intermittent slams of the foot roller against the bellows. I might use an electric blower if I were to build something like this again.

Helpful resource for pipe dimensions:
http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/construct...

#pipeorgan #woodenpipeorgan #organbuilding