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In the Wind: Creating a personal workspace

John Bishop
Steel drawers
Steel drawers (photo credit John Bishop)

Transitions

Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in December of 2001, just after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in that troubling time we felt extra lucky coming to this place at the end of a half-mile gravel road with lots of wooded land, a big lawn with beautiful gardens, a tidal waterfront, a beach, and a dock. Our four kids were teenagers then, and they brought their friends for visits. Lots of them liked to camp so we had little villages of tents along the waterfront. We already had a circle of friends in the area because of our history of summer rentals on an island nearby, and at that time we were living in the Boston area, so it was easy for friends from the city to come for festival weekends with lots of boating, swimming, and outdoor cooking.

We are on the Damariscotta River, a twelve-mile-long estuary from the ocean to the twin villages of Newcastle and Damariscotta. We are eight miles upriver from the ocean, and the tides here are ten to twelve feet. We quickly learned that we could approach a lobster fisherman in our boat and wave a canvas bag. Some waved us away, but most waved us in. There was something special about those transactions at sea; we learned to boast about “lobsters that had never been in a car.”

Twenty years ago this summer, we were married at Saint Andrew’s Church in Newcastle, Maine, in the first church building designed by Henry Vaughan (organ by George Hutchings), and we hosted a party in our yard. A neighbor supplied 500 oysters, and a Dixieland band provided fabulous music, parking their antique fire truck soundstage in the backyard above the tent. People who live across the river still remember the strains wafting across the water.

Our kids are now in their forties, three of the families have children for a total of six grandchildren. We marvel at all the blessings, but it is a big effort for a young family with two little children to drive four or five hundred miles to visit grandparents, so this is the time. Last fall we let our kids know that we had decided to sell the house, and we issued a command invitation—they would all come for Christmas, one last blast. They would be able to pack their cars full of stuff, a free for all.

We are waiting until spring to put the house on the market, giving us plenty of time to deal with what is now an extra houseful of the stuff of life. The gardens will be blooming, the mud season that turns the road into pudding will be past, the docks will be in the water, and the house will present at its best.

My special place

I have had access to a well-equipped workshop for over fifty years, and I have had my own workshop for over forty years. When we came to Newcastle, I took over the three-car garage as my oceanfront workshop, my fourth personal workspace. I promised Wendy that her car would be in the garage each winter, easy enough by keeping the table saw and band saw on dollies. I have releathered countless reservoirs and windchests here, and since I have always loved the user-interface part of organbuilding, I have renovated six organ consoles here. When we sold an Aeolian player organ to a family out west, I renovated it here and had it playing in the workshop, paper rolls and all. We had lots of dinner parties that summer so I could invite guests out to the shop for an organ demonstration before dessert. I could say it was the only pipe organ on the block, fair enough, because ours is the only house on the half-mile road. Several of them commented that until then they had no idea what it meant to be an organbuilder.

More transitions

I have made several life-altering decisions in my career. When I joined the Organ Clearing House, I knew I would have a demanding travel schedule, so I retired as a church musician. Just before the covid epidemic, I retired from the real work of organbuilding, shopwork, sitework, tuning, and maintenance, and settled into consultation, writing, and focusing on the sales and logistics of the Organ Clearing House. A couple years ago we sold our sailboat, feeling that as we have grown older the time has passed, ending a decades long love affair with being on the water. I still consider myself an organist and a sailor. But now as we anticipate leaving this house, I paraphrase a catchy line from the musical Hamilton, I’m not throwin’ away my shop!

We now live in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, about five miles from the western border with New York. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is ten minutes away, and since its founding, it has been a magnet attracting other cultural institutions to the area. It is a lovely house in a fun neighborhood, but there is no place for a proper workshop where I can take my tools, workbenches, and machines. I have a couple personal projects planned, including restoration of an eighteenth-century barrel organ that I inherited from my great-grandmother and have been dragging around for almost fifty years, so I have rented a nice space nearby with great spaces for a workshop and an office. There is also a kitchen and a full bath.

Tools of the trade

When I knew that I was finished with professional projects in my shop, I gave away or sold lots of stock including hundreds of feet of telephone cable used for wiring windchests (white with blue, blue with white, white with orange, orange with white . . .), components for making wind connections, and electrical supplies. I sold things online like a drawer full of Skinner toe studs (you never know when you might need one), a drawer of pallet springs, and a few boxes of Kimber-Allen keyboard contacts. I have thrown away a lot of miscellaneous organ parts that no one will miss, but I am keeping my tools.

Any organ builder will understand my saying that an artisan’s tools are a reflection on his or her career, philosophy, joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures. They show the passage of time. In my lifetime we have gone from spring-loaded Yankee screwdrivers to electric screwdrivers with heavy cords, to electric screwdrivers with inadequate rechargeable batteries, to today’s rechargeable tools with robust batteries that last for hours. The young artisan who has only used a screwdriver that has an LED headlight will never know what it was like for us in the 1970s squeezing into a dark corner under a reservoir with a heavy yellow trouble light with a power cord. There was the special feeling of the red-hot aluminum shield of the light scorching your sweaty armpit as you crouched under a windchest. The bouquet of battery-powered LED work lights I have now came with built-in hooks and magnets to hold them in place and ratcheted swiveling heads so you can focus the light exactly where you need it.

A manometer is an essential tool for an organbuilder. It is used to measure wind pressure, and it has appeared in several different forms over my career. My first was homemade, a three-foot-long piece of wood with a clear plastic tube fastened to it in a long U-shape. The trailing end was fitted with a wood pipe foot. You would fill the U halfway with water and put the pipe foot in a toe hole. Your helper would play the note, the water level would go down on the blow end and up on the other end, and you would measure the difference with a ruler to read the pressure. If you were not careful, you might splatter water across the windchest. Later I had one with a floppy tube and pipe foot, and a dial that read the pressure, then a compact thing with a steel tube with rubber foot and a round dial. My newest manometer has the tube and pipe foot and a digital readout. No more squirting water in the Mixture. (Never happened to me, but I have heard people talk about it.)

I have a shelf loaded with plastic cases that contain specialty tools. One is a kind of pair to a manometer, a tachometer to measure the speed of an electric motor. What does that have to do with organ wind pressure? I bought the tachometer when I was working with a big organ that was “wind sick,” my term for running out of wind. There was a huge Spencer blower, and all the regulators seemed to be working properly, but when you held a big chord at the end of a piece, the pressure sagged so the pitch dropped, a terrible sound. I verified that the blower was turning in the right direction (once fooled, never again), so I wondered if the blower was turning at the right speed. Sure enough, the engraved plate on the motor showed that the operating speed should be 1,800 RPM, but my new tachometer read 1,340. Rewinding the motor solved the problem, simple, except for the fact that a ninety-year-old eight-horsepower electric motor is likely the heaviest single thing in the organ, and it is buried behind a furnace in the basement. It was an expensive repair, hauling the motor up to street level to transport it to a shop, but now that it is done, no more sagging chords.

What else is in those plastic cases? A propane torch (or two) so I can heat and bend metal, a dado set for the table saw (lets you set up the saw to make a wide cut, like slots for bookshelves), a nice new DeWalt rechargeable saber saw (with a headlight), a set of Forstner drill bits (they don’t have a center point, the bit is guided by the circumference of the hole), and a tap-and-die set for cutting threads in steel for machine screws.

I have a shelf loaded with pot-shaped tools. Two are glue pots, pint and quart. There is a supply of hide glue in plastic bags, ground to the consistency of turbinado sugar. You mix the glue flakes with water in the pot and cook it until it is a well-blended, thick liquid. It is great for gluing leather and felt to wood, especially because it is easy to remove a century later using hot water or a steam iron with wet rags. Hot glue takes a knack, the more you use it the easier it is to handle. You can make the glue thicker for heavy reservoir gussets or thinner for tiny pouches. In one shop where I worked, my glue would get moldy after a few days, so I kept a cheesecloth bag of garlic cloves in my gluepot. It helped with the mold and made the glue smell better.

Along with the glue pots, I have a big double boiler like a vessel you might ladle chowder out of in a cafeteria. It keeps water just hot enough that I can put my hands in it and squeeze hot rags dry to wipe excess hot glue off my work.

Because it is similar in size and shape, I keep an ultrasound machine on the same shelf. It is a one-quart vessel with a timer switch that polishes metal. When I was restoring antique organs, I soaked threaded brass tracker ends in the ultrasound in a bath of Parsons Sudsy Ammonia to make the brass shiny like new. I have used it to clean the brass parts of reed pipes like shallots, tongues, and wedges, and the women in the family sometimes ask Grandpa if he can polish their jewelry. I am not going to give up that tool.

A personal history

I have a stacked rolling steel tool cabinet like you might see in an auto repair shop that has, from the top down, a drawer of ratchet/socket wrenches, one of open and box-end wrenches, one of an assortment of pliers from tiny long-nosed to large channel locks, one with measuring tools, one with cutting tools (knives, rotary cutters, small dovetail saws), and one with screwdrivers and chisels laid out on heavy felt. The bottom half of the cabinet has larger drawers with air compressor fittings and implements, staple and rivet guns, multi-spur drill bits up to three inches in diameter for drilling holes in rackboards, router bits, and arch punches up to three inches diameter for punching circles of leather and felt for releathering pneumatic windchests. My all-purpose service-call tool bag hangs on hooks next to my workbench so I can reach my usual basic tools easily.

As we prepare to leave this house, I am organizing, packing, and culling all those tools. It is a time to notice that the service-call tool bag has thirty-seven different screwdrivers in it of all different sizes and types (slotted, Phillips, Robertson-drive, Star-drive, etc.). You can’t do service work in Casavant organs without Canadian Robertson-drive screwdrivers.

I am planning a trip to Amsterdam this spring to visit iconic organs, and I am reading a history of the city that describes the lucrative herring trade there, a long period of time when Amsterdam’s wealth was rooted in pickled, salted, and kippered herring. In 1978 when my mentor John Leek took his family to the Netherlands for his parents’ sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, he brought back three different herring knives as gifts for me. They are in that steel drawer of cutting tools, sharp as razors, but the blades are much shorter than when they were new as I sharpened them hundreds of times. I have had those knives for forty-seven years. When John was first teaching me to work with wood, I ordered a fancy set of Sheffield steel Marples chisels. John quipped, “All you need now is some wood.” I have had those chisels for nearly fifty years, and like the herring knives, they are not as long as when they were new. Just think of all the things I made with those tools, impost moldings, tower crowns, keyboards, windchests, wind lines, case panels. My hands ache as I remember.

Anyone who works with their hands, whether woodworker, leatherworker, mechanic, quilter, weaver, or sewer has a cherished collection of tools that reflects their philosophy about their work. Type “Don’t ask to borrow my tools” into an internet search, and you will see some hilarious and some brutal attitudes. I keep my tools in good condition for what they are used for. You don’t use a sharp pair of wire cutters to pull out a bent nail. Each tool has a history, each tool means something different to me. I have had five personal workstations in shops where I have worked, and I am excited about setting up the next (last?) one.

§

On June 21, 2021, the workshop of Dobson Pipe Organ Builders in Lake City, Iowa, burned to the ground. A large organ under construction for a church in Sydney, Australia, was lost, as well as all the company’s stock, supplies, and equipment. When I learned about the fire, I thought about each of the employee’s personal workspaces, imagining what it would feel like to lose that lifetime of tools. On June 23, 2021, a story by Ann Hinga Klein about the fire was published in The New York Times. In it, she told of a “retired West Coast organbuilder [who] sent a check for $2,250, which he estimated would provide fifteen organbuilders with $150 each to purchase new tools.” That was a lovely gesture, which implied the giver’s understanding of an artisan’s relationship with his tools. I love buying new tools. There is a box on one of my shelves filled with new tools so I have backups for when a tool breaks or wears out, but I cherish the tools that have made the long journey with me.

In the March 2017 issue of The Diapason, pages 16–17, I wrote about my visit to the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in Warren, Maine, about ten miles from home in Newcastle. There they make hand tools for woodworkers of the highest quality. We drive by frequently, and I itch to stop as though I needed a $500 jointer plane. I am happy that I have found a nice space to set up a new shop. I will let you know how it turns out.

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