In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The truth about holes
Almost thirty years ago my wife and I were expecting our first child. I was working for organbuilder John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, and we were in the midst of building an organ for St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. I was drilling the holes in rackboards—those horizontal boards mounted on windchests that support the pipes about six inches above the toeboards.
It wasn’t a large organ, only eleven stops on the manuals, so including the Mixture, there were about 760 holes to drill. That’s not quite 14 ranks times 56 notes, but some were in the façade, and some others were tubed off the main chests and mounted on the inside walls of the case.
You determine the sizes of the holes using a jig that is a mock-up of a toeboard-rackboard assembly with holes drilled in the rackboard to match all the appropriate drill sizes. You move each pipe among the holes in the jig until you find the right size, then write the drill size on the rackboard by the mark for the pipe hole. That being finished, I had laid out all the marked rackboards on a table near the drill-press and was going through all the boards with each change of the drill-bit. I start with the smallest holes in the remote chance that I might drill one extra hole of a given size. If you make a mistake, it’s easier to drill a hole bigger than smaller!
I suppose I would have been using around 30 different bits for this job, starting with something like 7/32″, graduating by 32nds to one inch, by eighths to two inches, and by quarters to three. I guess it took about a day-and-a-half, and all the while I was expecting that call from home. I was sure it wouldn’t be on Wednesday. It would have to be Thursday, because that would mean I’d have to cancel choir rehearsal, an ice storm was predicted, and the hospital was an hour away in Cleveland. Sure enough, Michael joined us on Thursday afternoon. A couple days later I went back to finish the rackboards. I have no specific recollection, but I bet there were a few mistakes.
If you’d like to know something about this organ, go to <A HREF="http://www.stalbansva.org/">www.stalbansva.org</A&gt;, click on “Ministries,” then click on “Music.” You’ll see photos of the organ and its stoplist.

On with the show
The same number of holes must be drilled in the toeboards, the sliders, and the windchest table in order for the notes to play. That makes about 3,200 holes. But wait, I almost forgot to mention that the toeboards were laminated with interior channeling because the spacing of the slider holes is closer together than that of the pipe holes—so add another 780 holes.
We drill holes in the ends of squares and roller arms to accommodate the tracker action. We drill holes in the keyboards for balance and guide pins. We drill thousands of screw holes to hold the whole thing together. In an electro-pneumatic organ there are rows of holes that serve as pouch wells, pitman wells, housings for primary and secondary valves, and miles of channeling drilled through various windchest components to connect the interior of the pouch wells to the atmosphere, allowing pneumatics to exhaust when actions are activated. Counting on my fingers, I guess that there would be something like 7,000 holes in a ten-stop pitman windchest. Really!
You might say that the art of organbuilding is knowing where to put the holes, and what size each should be.
Drill baby, drill!

Just a little bit
There are hundreds of drill-bits in any organbuilding workshop. There are multi-spur bits that have center points for drilling larger holes. There are Forstner bits that are guided by the outside edge rather than by a center point, handy if you need to “stretch” a hole by cutting another half-moon. There are twist drills with 60º bevels on the points for drilling smaller holes such as screw holes. These are also used to drill holes in metal. There are countersinks that chamfer a screw hole so the flat head of a flat-head screw is flush with the surface of the wood. There are airplane bits, which are twist drills 16 or 18 inches long. I don’t know why they’re called airplane bits. Drilling holes in airplanes wouldn’t require a very long bit.
Any organ shop will sport an impressive rack with rows of bits arranged in order of size. The smallest might be around one-hundredth of an inch, the largest would be something like three inches.

Twist-and-turn
You need a variety of machines to turn those bits. The workbench workhorse is now the rechargeable drill. I have had a long habit of calling the electric hand drill a “drill-motor” much to the annoyance of at least one of my co-workers. In my mind this distinguishes the machine from the bit. You use a drill-motor to turn a drill-bit. I think that if you just say “drill” you could be referring either to the motor or the bit. Let’s be specific. I know I got that habit from someone else, but I don’t remember who. Terence, I didn’t make it up.
We have electric hand drills with half-inch chucks that can handle the larger multi-spur bits, but there is a lot of torque involved in drilling large holes, and if you are bearing down on the thing with your shoulder to cut through the wood you run the risk of getting whacked in the chin by the handle of the drill motor when the bit gets caught in the wood. It’s never actually happened to me but I’ve read about it! (But notice I said “when,” not “if.”)
The workshop workhorse is the drill-press. It’s a stand-up machine with a motor at eye level that’s connected to the arbor with a series of belts. The belts are arranged on stacks of pulleys—you can move the belts to different-sized pulleys to change the speed of the drill. There’s a sheet metal hood over the pulleys to protect the worker. We use slower speeds for drilling through metal—the harder the metal, the slower the speed—and if you’re drilling through a piece of steel, it’s a good idea to have a can of oil with you to lubricate the hole every few seconds. But be careful not to get oil on the surface of any of your wood pieces, as that will foil your attempts to glue pieces of wood together, or to put nice finishes on the wood when the piece is complete.
There’s a spoked handle that you turn to drive the drill-bit into the piece of work. There’s a table which is normally square to the drill-bit, but that can be adjusted if you need to drill a hole at an angle. We stand at the drill press, one hand holding the work firmly against the table, the other working the handle to move the drill-bit into the wood. If you have long hair and you’re not careful, you can get it caught in the pulleys and lose a tuft. If you have loose clothing or, God forbid, a necktie, you can get reeled violently into the machine like a big dull catfish being reeled into a boat.

Careful of blowout
When you’re drilling holes with multi-spur bits, you have to drill from both sides of the wood, or the bit will tear the opposite surface as it goes through the board. It will also tear up the table of the drill-press. So the location of the hole is marked with a smaller bit, say one-eighth, that goes through the board. You drill in a little way with the big bit, then turn the board over and drill from the other side. Doesn’t that double the number of holes you’re drilling?

The saw, the hole-saw, and nothing but the saw
A hole-saw is a specialty tool that’s turned by a drill-motor or drill-press. It’s a circular saw blade with the teeth pointing downward, something like an aggressive cookie-cutter. There’s a smaller twist drill-bit mounted in the middle that guides the center of the hole. They come in sets graduated by the quarter-inch, nestled inside one another like those Russian Babushka dolls. Hole-saws are relatively easy to handle up to six inches in diameter. Bigger than that and they get to be rambunctious. Hole-saws are great for cutting wind holes in reservoirs and windchests. Take a look at this McMaster-Carr page: <http://www.mcmas ter.com/#hole-saw-sets/=9qqoqp>.

Circle cutters
If you need a hole larger than three inches, use a circle cutter (http://www.mcmaster.com/#adjustable-hole-cutters/=9qqq0f). It has a twist drill-bit to center the hole, and a cutter mounted on an adjustable arm. You can set these up to cut holes nearly eight inches in diameter. But be sure to set the drill-press on the slowest speed, and use clamps to hold your work piece to the drill-press table. These tools are pretty scary. They can jam in the track they cut, and the holes often burn during drilling. And if you don’t tighten the set-screw that fastens the adjustable arm, it can get flung across the shop by the motion of the machine.

Oops
What happens if you put a hole in the wrong place? (Never happened to me.) You can glue in a piece of dowel and cut it flush, but the grain will be running in the opposite direction. Better to use a plug-cutter. With this neat tool you can drill into the face of a piece of wood and produce a cross-grained dowel about an inch long. Drill out your mistake with the correct size bit, and glue in your plug. Sand it off and you’ll have a hard time finding it again: <http://www.mcmaster.com/#wood-plug-cutters/=9qqszb&gt;.

The twist
Twist drill bits come in many sizes. I have three basic indexes of twist drill-bits near my drill-press. One goes from one-eighth to one-half an inch, graduated by 64ths. One is an industrial wire-gauge numbered set—the numbers go from 1 (.228″, which is a little less than a quarter-inch) to 80 (.0135″, which is very tiny!). And the third is “letter-gauge” that goes from A (.234″, or .006″ larger than the number 1) to Z (.4130″, or a little smaller than 7/16″).
I have a chart hanging on the wall nearby that shows all three sets graduated by thousands-of-an-inch. If you’re going to drill axle holes in action parts you choose the material you’re going to use for the axle (let’s say it’s .0808″ phosphorous bronze wire), then choose a drill-bit that’s just a little larger. The 3/32″ bit is way too big at .0938″. The #45 bit is .082″ and the #44 bit is .086″. Here the choice would be between the #45 and the #44, so I’d drill one of each and try the wire in the hole. But wait! I have one more trick—a set of metric twist drill-bits graduated by tenths-of-a-millimeter. The 2.2-millimeter bit is .0866″. That’s .0006″ larger than the #44 but I bet it’s too large. The 2.1-millimeter bit is .0827″. That’s only .0019″ larger than the wire—would be a pretty close fit—probably too tight.
If you’d like a glimpse at what these sets of bits look like, go to <http://www.mcmaster.com/#catalog/116/2416/=9qg6xs&gt;. This is page 2416 of the catalogue of McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply Company, an absolute heaven for the serious hardware shopper. The “Combination Set” at the top of the page has the 64ths to 1/2″, numbers 1–60, and 1–13mm graduated by half-millimeters–—total of 114 bits for $286.54. But be reasonable—this is not the perfect Father’s Day gift for every home handyman. A simple set that goes from 1/8″ to 1/2″ graduated by 32nds to 1/4″ and 16ths to 1/2″ will be plenty, available for about twenty bucks from your Home Depot or Lowe’s store. (I prefer the
DeWalt sets.)

Why the fuss?
You might wonder why I would spend so much energy choosing the right drill-bit, and spending so much money to have at hand an appropriate variety of bits from which to choose. (I bet I have more than $5,000 worth of drill-bits.)
A pipe organ is a musical instrument. It’s a work of art. It’s a work of liturgical art. It’s a very special creation. But look inside an organ—any type of organ—and you see machinery. You see thousands of parts and pieces all hung together to make a whole. Some organs look downright industrial inside. That defines a conflict. How can a ten-ton pile of industrial equipment be considered artwork?
The answer is simple. If it’s built to exacting specifications so the sense of the machine melts into the magic of musical response to the fingers and feet of the musician, then it’s artwork. No question, there is such a thing as a pipe organ that’s little more than a machine, but that is not the ideal which our great artist-organbuilders strive to achieve.
If I spend an extra hour making sure that the axle-holes I drill in the set of squares I’m making are exactly the right size, then that keyboard action will feel good to the organists’ fingers, there will be no slop or wobble in the feel of the keys, and the machine I’m making will not impose itself between the musician and the music. (Squares are those bits of tracker action that allow the action to turn corners.)
And remember, if I’m making squares for an organ, I’m making enough of them for each note on the keyboard, and if it’s a larger organ with several keyboards and actions that turn several corners, I might be making 500 squares for the single instrument. While I’m doing that, as long as I think there will be another organ to build, I might as well make a bigger batch—let’s say I’ll spend a week making 2,500 squares. Each has an axle hole, and each has an action hole at the ends of its two arms. That’s 7,500 holes. And those holes are so small that I’ll produce only enough sawdust to fill a coffee can. (I don’t know why I say sawdust when I’m talking about drilling holes, but I’ve never heard anyone say drilldust, and neither has my spellchecker.)

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The other day I was in a meeting with people from a church who are in the very early stages of dreaming about acquiring a pipe organ. One fellow was really surprised by the cost of organ building—“how can it possibly cost that much to build an organ? You’re going to have to convince me.” I answered him by talking about thousands of person-hours, tons of expensive materials, a workshop equipped with a wide variety of industrial machinery and tools, and collective lifetimes of careful learning and experience forming our staff.
I also told the group that the moment the doubters in a congregation finally really understand why organbuilding is so expensive is the day the new organ is delivered to the church, and the entire sanctuary is filled with exquisitely crafted parts. I’ve been present for the delivery of many new pipe organs, and I’ve often heard the comment, “Now I see why it cost so much.”
As I drove away from that church, my mind took me on this romp about fussing with drill-bits, a reflection on the care, thought, precision, and resourcefulness that I so admire amongst my colleague organbuilders. So I ran back to my hotel room and started to write. I can do the same with lots of other kinds of tools. Want to come see my saws? ■

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Expressly expressive
I once heard an orchestral conductor state that the pipe organ is not an expressive instrument because the player cannot alter the volume of a single pipe. This ignorant statement was part of his argument against including an expensive new organ in an even more expensive new concert hall.
One might respond that most of the instruments of the symphony orchestra are unmusical because they can only play one note at a time. By saying “most” I’m excepting the strings of course, which can play two notes at time—maybe three under special circumstances. So an orchestra (by definition) needs many instruments to play music, expressively or not.
Aha! In order for the organ to be an expressive instrument, it comprises thousands of pipes. And big groups of those pipes are enclosed in wonderful expression machines that give the organist all sorts of control over dynamics.
The first Swell boxes were pretty simple affairs made of light wood with a few shutters in front that were operated by a lever near the floor. You could push the lever down and a little sideways with your foot to latch it open, you could let it slam closed, or you hold it halfway open, calf muscles a-trembling. Rigs like this are found on very old English organs, and there are quite a few nineteenth-century American organs that still have expression boxes like that. In 1996 I restored an organ built by E. & G.G. Hook in 1868 that had a “ratchet” Swell pedal. There was a sort of stationary wooden gear whose teeth could arrest the motion of the pedal in five or six different places. You could push the pedal a certain way to release the ratchet or you could leave the shutters partially open at any of those positions. And it was a good idea to release the ratchet as you opened the shutters—otherwise they said “click-click-click” as they opened.
The development of the mechanical balanced Swell pedal was a pretty big deal. Most American organs built between 1870 and 1900 have them. A sturdy mechanical linkage connects the pedal to the shutters. Because gravity works on horizontal shutters, balanced Swell shutters are almost always vertical. You can take your foot off the Swell pedal and the shutters stay still right where you left them. The only problem is that you have to remember to leave the shutters open when you’re finished playing to allow the temperature inside the Swell box to stay as close as possible to the ambient climate of the organ. Leaving the shutters closed typically results in a different temperature inside the Swell box so the Swell won’t be in tune with the Great. That’s not too big a deal because as soon as you open the shutters the temperature will moderate and the pitches will come back together—so if you’re halfway home and realize you’ve forgotten to leave the Swell pedal open, don’t worry about it too much!
If you get halfway home and wonder if you’ve left the blower running, then you’d better go back to the church.
And by the way, in most electro-pneumatic organs, the shutters are held open by springs, so when the organ is turned off the shutters open, no matter what position the pedal was left in.

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During the Great Revival of classic styles of organbuilding in the second half of the twentieth century, many of us got used to playing organs that had no expression enclosures. Twenty years into that movement, shutters started finding their way back into organs, and today new organs are built with very sophisticated collections of expression chambers including double expressions—those fancy divisions in which an expression box that encloses ten stops might also enclose another expression box with five or six stops. It’s mighty effective when either very powerful voices (Tuba) or very soft voices (Unda Maris) are double-enclosed. The Tuba can start from nothing and Swell to a roar, and the Unda Maris can start from a whisper and vanish into thin air.
I often write about the organ as the most mechanical of instruments. (I’m glad that opinionated ignorant conductor didn’t wade into this pond!) A large organ, especially with electro-pneumatic action, can look like a mysterious mechanical monster inside. It’s no wonder that the sexton of your church mistakes it for a furnace room and piles it full of folding chairs. (You shouldn’t be storing chairs in the furnace room either.)
The organbuilder is forever challenged by the conflict between the organ’s mechanical identity and its artistic purpose. If the music is interrupted by too much mechanical noise, the effect is diminished.
The expression shutters can be the biggest culprit. Who among us has not sat through a recital or a worship service marred by a squeaking Swell shutter? I once attended a choral concert in a conservatory concert hall in which several pieces were accompanied on the organ. The Swell shutters were exposed as part of the façade, they squeaked, and the organist had an annoying habit of beating time with the Swell pedal. Flap-flap-flap, squeak-squeak-squeak was all we could hear.
I’ve made lots of service calls to correct squeaking shutters. Often enough a little squirt of oil or silicone is all that’s needed—that’ll be $200 for the travel and time and four cents for the squirt.

§

For the organist, the ideal expression shutters can silence the division when closed and allow it to roar when open. They can open or close in a nano-second, and if you operate the pedal slowly they provide infinite gradation of volume —no jerking from one stage to the next. OK, we’ll see what we can do.
In order to achieve really effective expression, the box and its shutters must be massive. If you build a Swell box and shutters out of three-quarter-inch-thick wood, you’re building more of a soundboard than an enclosure.
Let’s start with the fabric of the box. The walls and ceiling of the box should both deaden and reflect the sound of the organ. Deaden—so when the shutters are closed there’s no resonance going on. Reflect— so no sound is lost or absorbed by the interior surfaces. In other words, the sound should be effectively contained when the shutters are closed and when the shutters are open the sound should be propelled out through them.
Organbuilders have experimented with all sorts of construction styles. The simplest is heavy soft wood. Use two-inch-thick pine for the walls and you’re doing pretty well. Try two one-inch-panels with an airspace between. Just as massive, but the airspace cuts down the transmission of vibration. How about fill the airspace with sawdust? That works great—the sawdust really absorbs sound so the box is most effective when closed. But it’s a real drag when you’re surprised by fifteen cubic feet of sawdust pouring out by accident when you’re dismantling an organ.
There’s a material called MDF (maximum density fiberboard). It is manufactured in 4′ x 8′ sheets like plywood. It’s made from a sophisticated recipe, but it can be described simply as sawdust and glue cast into sheets. A sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood weighs about 65 pounds, heavy enough. But the same size sheet of MDF weighs 96 pounds. We have built a number of expression boxes using double-thicknesses of MDF. It’s hard work because the stuff is so heavy, and because it’s so dense it’s hard to cut—it burns up saw blades like kindling wood. But it sure makes an effective tonal enclosure.
My first work in organbuilding shops focused mostly on classic-style mechanical-action organs. It was from that bias I heard or read that E. M. Skinner had built cement swell boxes. Cement swell boxes? How decadent. What I pictured was the newly poured foundation of a house with rebar (steel reinforcement bars) sticking up out of it. How could that be musical? But when I finally worked on an organ that had such a thing I realized that my youthful and ignorant bias was exactly that—a youthful and ignorant bias. In fact, the “cement” swell box has a structure of studs and joists something like normal wood-frame construction with heavy plaster surfaces, and a finish coat of Keene’s Cement, which is an anhydrous calcined gypsum mixed with an accelerator used as a hard finish, or more to the point, hard plaster. The heavy structure of the walls and ceiling deaden the sound and the Keene’s Cement surface reflects it—the best of both worlds. The expression chambers of the mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York are built as free-standing rooms in the huge spaces some 90 feet up above both sides of the chancel. The walls are thick and heavy, and the surfaces are finished with Keene’s Cement, and those powerful reeds sure go quiet when the shutters are closed.

I shudder to think
What about the shutters? Just like the boxes, there are lots of ways to build expression shutters. They are usually made of wood, ideally an inch-and-a-half thick or more. The edges are usually beveled so they effectively overlap when closed. The edges of the shutters where they come in contact with one another usually have heavy felt or some other soft material glued to them so they close quietly and tightly. Some builders make shutters out of metal and we’ve even seen them made of glass and Plexiglas. Just like the walls of the expression chamber, the best shutters are massive and shaped and fit so they close really tight. The more massive, the more they contain the sound of the organ.
The shutters are mounted in frames—we call them expression frames. Sometimes the shutters are vertical, sometimes horizontal. As I said earlier, it’s easiest to build a balanced mechanical expression action if the shutters are vertical—that way there’s no effect of gravity on the weight of the shutters. All you have to balance is the action itself.
Shutters are mounted in the expression frames with some kind of rotary bearing to allow the shutters to pivot. Most often you find a strong steel pin (axle) that pivots in a hole drilled in hard wood. The holes and pins are greased, and if the shutters are vertical, the bottom bearing is figured out so as to keep the shutter high enough that it doesn’t rub against the wooden frame. In fact, those bottom bearings are often adjustable—if the shutter settles and starts squeaking against the frame, you can raise it with a turn of a screw.
Some organbuilders go the extra mile and use commercial ball bearings for mounting expression shutters.
It’s also ideal for the shutters to be easily removable. In many organs it’s necessary to remove shutters in order to tune, but you also want to be able to remove a shutter that has warped and needs to be planed straight.

And something to drive it
Some pneumatic expression systems feature an individual pneumatic to operate each shutter. Each contact on the expression pedal opens one shutter. (Most Möller organs work that way.) But it’s more common for the shutters to be linked together by an action that is in turn operated by a single machine. The machines can be electro-pneumatic or all-electric. But what you’re looking for is a combination of expression machine, linkage, and shutters that have a large enough travel so the shutters can close tight and open really wide, move silently when operated either fast or slow, and that have plenty of gradation between stages so that the range of expression seems infinite.
Most electro-pneumatic or electric expression machines have eight stages. It’s generally agreed that for most organs eight-stage expression are sufficient. I think it was Ernest Skinner who built the first sixteen-stage machines. (Dear reader, if you know otherwise please share it.) Those machines are elegant, fast, and powerful. Dividing the travel of the console expression machine into sixteen stages really gives a smooth operation.
Mr. Skinner called his expression motors Whiffle-trees. The term Whiffle-tree was originally used to describe the system of harnesses and reins that tied a team of horses together, allowing the weight of the load to be distributed between the horses according to their individual strength. Mr. Skinner used that principal to harness a row of pneumatic motors together so that each motor (or stage of the machine) contributes to the motion of the shutters and collectively they equal the total motion of the machine. Skinner’s Whiffle-tree expression motors were installed in thousands of Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs and in my opinion set the standard for electro-pneumatic pipe organ expression.
There are several suppliers to the pipe organ industry that have developed and market all-electric expression motors. The best of these use the powerful, compact, and quiet electric motors developed for wheelchairs. They are equipped with solid-state controls that translate the contacts on the console expression pedal into stages of expression. The organbuilder can adjust them for different distances of travel and adjust the amount of travel and the speed of each stage separately. So, for example, you can make the first step from fully closed be fast on opening (so it responds instantly) and slow on closing (so it doesn’t slam shut). Mr. Skinner handled this by using a small exhaust valve for the first stage, which choked its speed, keeping the shutters from slamming.

A rose by any other name
You’ll notice that I’m saying expression box, pedal, or shutter rather than Swell box. It’s true that most organs with expression are two-manual organs, and on a two-manual organ the expressive division is usually a Swell. But keeping the language clean, I’d rather not put a Choir division in a Swell box—so expression is the word.

§

In a large organ, the shutters of one division might collectively weigh close to a ton. It takes a lot of thought and skilled engineering to get that amount of stuff to move quickly and silently in response to the artistic twitch of an organist’s ankle. But when an expression chamber is working well, it can produce breathtaking effects. As familiar as I am with all that gear, I love to think of that big mass of stuff on the move when I’m sitting in the pews listening to an organ. It’s difficult to express. 

It’s all about the tools.

Last December, I spent several weeks driving around the Boston area tuning organs. In the Boston suburbs, I-95 is an unavoidable, perpetual traffic jam.¹ It was opened in 1951 as the first circumferential highway in the United States, and has been in a perpetual state of expansion ever since. It runs about sixty miles from Braintree to Gloucester, at a radius of about ten miles from the center of the city. A lot of wonderful pipe organs have left the Gloucester workshop of C. B. Fisk, Inc., at the northern end of Route 128.

These days, they’re finishing adding a fourth lane in each direction between Needham and Waltham, complete with the expected construction delays. During the recent tuning season, my colleague Amory and I drove up and down that stretch of highway over a dozen times. We’re both machine nerds, and each time we passed, we had our eyes on the construction site in the median strip, especially a particular Caterpillar Payloader (Model 938M). According to the Caterpillar website (www.cat.com) it’s an 18-ton machine with a bucket the size of a standard dump truck, around five cubic yards. That particular machine stood out from the throng because it was operated by a young woman. The usual hulking, cigar-chomping operating engineer looks small in the cab of a machine like that. This one with the braided ponytail looked tiny. She sat up there in perfect control, carrying materials up and down the narrow lanes. We saw her standing on the ground next to the machine, talking with the guy with the clipboard about the next chore, the wheel of the machine towering over her. I expect that she had to work hard to earn the respect of her co-workers. Some women face a glass ceiling. She was facing a rubber ceiling—a rubber tire seven feet tall that weighs 500 pounds.

But when you consider that a cubic yard of gravel weighs about 3,000 pounds (a bucket full would weigh 7½ tons) it wouldn’t matter if the operator of the machine weighed 100 or 300 pounds. It’s the tool that makes it possible, along with the operator’s skill.

§

I have two different kits of hand tools that I use in my work. One is the size and weight of a small air conditioner; I use a folding two-wheel dolly to cart it around. It has hundreds of tools in it, and I use it in my workshop and on job sites where I’ll be working for more than a day or two. I call my other kit my “City Bag.” When Wendy and I moved to New York City, and I started making service calls on organs here, I found a neat bag about the size of a briefcase, with lots of pockets and slots for tools and supplies. It has a padded shoulder strap, and I can carry it on subways. Even though the kit is intended to be compact and lightweight, it includes about twenty screwdrivers, some of which are multi-tools with as many as ten different bits. Why so many? In a pipe organ, we encounter massive steel screws that support huge pedal stops that weigh many tons, and tiny brass jobs that my sixty-year-old eyes can barely see. While some screws are out in the open and easy to reach, others are squeezed into tight places, hidden behind the legs of a windchest and stuffed into dark corners. I pick through the multitude of choices in my bag, and choose the perfect tool for the job. A couple of my screwdrivers even have lights in them.

Besides the travel bags, there are thousands of hand tools in my workshop. I have cordless drill motors and screwdrivers and cordless saws, an array of electric hand tools, and stationary machines such as saws, drills, and planers. I have hand planes, soldering irons, multimeters, arch punches, files, and knives. I have a drawer full of staple and pop-rivet guns. My collection of hammers includes tack and brad hammers, ball-peen hammers, hammers with plastic and leather heads, dead blow mallets, sledge hammers, and the expensive lignum vitae mallet I use with my chisels along with the usual carpenter’s hammers. If you have to whack something, you’d better whack it with the right tool.

When I’m tuning an organ, I’m climbing and crawling all over the thing, and while it’s a nuisance to try to carry too much with me, it’s more of a nuisance to have to climb down out of the organ to pick up a tool I need for a ten-second job, like a pair of pliers for a tight magnet cap or a file to remove the burr that snagged my shirt. So I carry two things in holsters on my belt, a Leatherman™ and a small flashlight. I have a Leatherman™ in each tool kit. They include sharp blades, scissors (for cutting that treble pipe that’s a tad too long), pliers that are sturdy enough to give a good squeeze, a file, a saw, an assortment of screwdriver bits, and a bottle opener that I actually never use on the job. It’s an excellent tool, and my name is engraved on it.

Not just any tool

Back in the days when Sears was robust, I bought many of my hand tools there. They were good sturdy tools, but the best part was the lifetime guarantee. When I broke a pair of pliers, chipped the blade of a screwdriver, or when the tip of the screwdriver got rounded, they would replace it instantly. The broken tool went in a bin in the tool department, and I walked away with a new replacement, no questions asked. There’s a wide range in the quality of the tools we buy, and cheaply made tools give cheap results. Wire cutters whose jaws don’t meet can’t cut wires. A dull screwdriver hops out of the slot in the screw head and gouges the surface of the wood. A saw with poorly set teeth cuts a curved curf. And a hand plane whose blade won’t hold alignment chatters along a piece of wood leaving a path of destruction.

Hand planes are essential to fine woodworking, and every organbuilder has a variety of them. Mine rest in a drawer on a pad of thick (Swell Shutter) felt. A good plane has a smooth machined “shoe” and a mechanism that holds the blade tight at an angle just right for the particular task. I use a styrene candle (the stub of an altar candle) to lubricate the soles of my planes. The blade should be made of tempered steel so it will hold a good edge. The Stanley Tool Works of New Britain, Connecticut, was the standard bearer for producing a wide variety of excellent hand planes, but as the company diversified in the middle of the twentieth-century, many of the specialty planes were discontinued, and the general quality declined.

Lie-Nielsen Toolworks is located in Warren, Maine, about twenty minutes from our place there. It’s right on Route 1, the coastal highway that stretches from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent, Maine, and we often drive past on our way to the rich culture and fantastic restaurants in Rockland, Rockport, and Camden. Lie-Nielsen occupies an attractive campus of frame buildings, and though I own several of their tools and have visited their website often, I never stopped in to visit until recently. There’s a sales showroom so the public is welcome to stop in, but when I called saying that I was interested in writing about their products, they invited me for a tour of the workshops. 

Thomas Lie-Nielsen founded the company in 1981 to produce a single specialty tool patterned after the original made by Stanley, the “No. 95” edge plane. It’s made of bronze with an “integral 90° fence,” and it’s used for squaring the edge of a piece of wood. The bronze edge plane sold well from the beginning, and over the years the company has expanded so that today, more than 90 workers produce a line of more than 150 tools.  

My tour started in the showroom, where senior sales representative Deneb Pulchalski shared the company’s history and philosophy with me. He put tools into my hands, one after the other, allowing me to feel the heft of the specialized metals and the jewelry-like polish of all the surfaces. While an ordinary Stanley bench plane sells for around $50 at Home Depot, the equivalent Lie-Nielsen tool costs about seven times as much. You might imagine that the market for expensive tools of such exceptional quality would be limited to professional woodworkers, but the company understands how valuable they are to enthusiastic amateurs. A skillful woodworker can get decent results from a mediocre tool. A tool of exceptional quality allows the amateur to make a clean cut.

As I handled those beautiful tools, I was struck by the notion that a tool designed for a particular task, made with exquisite care from the finest materials, is an inspiration to the craftsman who uses it. The quality of the tool transfers to the quality of the piece. The weight of a tool is critical. It must be heavy enough to generate momentum as it passes over a piece of wood, but light enough to be easily managed. The tempering and sharpness of the blade, the angle of the blade, and the integrity of the controls that position it have everything to do with the alacrity of the shavings jumping off the piece.

What’s in it?

Julia Child taught us that if a bottle of wine wasn’t good enough to drink, it shouldn’t go in the sauce. Fifty years after her charming attitude toward food and cooking hit television screens across the United States, the farm-to-table movement grows in popularity. Besides Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Warren, Maine, is home to Beth’s, a prolific produce farm with a richly stocked retail stand, and Curtis Meats, a cooperative butcher that provides locally produced meat and poultry. The quality of each ingredient adds to the quality of the dish.

Organbuilders work hard to procure the best materials from hardwoods for cases to chrome-tanned leather for pneumatic actions, from pure metals for organ pipes to woven felt for action bushings. You can’t make a beautiful cabinet out of bad wood. The people at Lie-Nielsen go to great lengths to be sure that their tools are made from the best materials.

As we’ve learned to dread the sight of an iPhone plummeting toward the floor, the experienced woodworker cringes when a prized plane falls from the workbench. Most commercially available hand planes are made of standard cast iron, otherwise known as “Grey Iron.” The internal microscopic structure of that metal is shaped like flakes, which allows the metal to crack easily on impact. Lie-Nielsen tools are made of “Ductile Iron,” a variation of cast iron whose structure is rounded nodules that resist cracking. They’ve tested their #60½ Rabbet Block Plane with a 15-foot drop to a concrete floor without cracking the casting.

Manganese bronze is used for the bodies of smaller planes and for many components of other tools. According to the Lie-Nielsen website, this material is “heavier than iron, and adds heft to the tool, doesn’t rust, won’t crack if dropped, and has wonderful warmth in the hand.”

The castings of iron and bronze are “stress relieved” by soaking them at high temperatures. Slow cooling then relieves internal stress so the tools will stay perfectly straight after machining. With all that attention to the bodies and parts of the planes, you can imagine how seriously they take making the blades, using a particularly high grade of double-tempered tool steel to ensure that the blades will take and retain the sharpest cutting edges.

For two hours on a rainy afternoon, I walked through the Lie-Nielsen workshops with customer service representative Christopher Stevens. I saw the world map with pins showing the distant locations where Lie-Nielsen tools are used, including the Geographic South Pole. I saw rows of precision production CNC machines producing exact copies of myriad tool bodies and parts. I learned that each worker at a production station acquires a dial micrometer when hired and saw them holding tool parts up to the light, squinting to see the measurements accurately. I saw workers methodically moving through bins of parts, rejecting those that were not within specifications. I saw men and women sitting in front of huge, high-speed buffing wheels, putting a polish and shine worthy of fine jewelers like Shreve, Crump & Low on large tool bodies and small adjustment screws.

I was greeted cordially at each workstation and saw smiles that showed the satisfaction that comes from the awareness of participating in excellence­—a smile that is often seen at the workbenches in the finest organbuilding workshops.

And I saw bins and carts loaded with fabulous examples of engineering and craftsmanship, along with an army of specialized craftsmen pouring their skills and energy into the tools that will soon be prized by the seasoned hands that hold them. All this in a bright and airy working environment, designed to keep the workers comfortable, enhancing the quality of their products.

You can visit the Lie-Nielsen website at www.lie-nielsen.com. You can peruse through the terrific list of tools and purchase everything from a temporary tattoo to the finest premium tools. Your next project will be the better for it.

From tool to tool

The organ in a church is the primary tool for the resident organist. I hope it was beautifully made by craftsmen using the finest tools. The high-end smoothing plane leaves a lustrous finish on the wood. The bench, the music rack, the key cheeks are all made of exquisite woods, smoothed to be luxurious to the touch. The joinery of the case and the internal structure are the source of the instrument’s integrity, both its sturdiness and rigidity, and its resonance and ability to project musical tone. All those steps are accomplished by skilled hands handling familiar, even beloved tools. If an organ does not sit firmly, if it’s free to sway, wobble, or tip, it cannot have stable tuning or adjustment of the intricate mechanical parts. A structure that’s not plumb will ultimately be wrecked by gravity. An instrument that stands straight and true will be kept stable by gravity.

Windlines must be rigid and roomy with gentle bends so the organ’s air, its breath, passes from blower to regulator and from regulator to windchest without obstruction, with a minimum of turbulence. If organ pipes receive little tornados through their toe holes, they speak not with the tongues of angels, but of tipsy demons. The organbuilder creates the wind system with care and thought, his sharp tools fitting comfortably in his hands, adding to the pleasure and enhancing the outcome.

Windchests are built with dovetailed corners, not because dovetails look so lovely, but because they are the strongest joints for connecting pieces of wood, end to end, at 90° angles. The internal channels of pitman chests are formed, drilled, bored with the sharpest tools, ensuring that there is no tearing of grain allowing leakage between notes. If air can leak from one channel to the next, two notes play at once. Organists don’t like that. The ribs that form the note channels in slider chests are made with “vertical grain.” Since wood only splits perpendicular to the growth rings of a tree (like the spokes of a wheel), a rib made of slab grain can split, causing air to leak from one note to the next. If the joints are made with dull tools, air can pass through. No matter how hard you try, quarter-inch glue is not air-tight. Organists don’t like this, either. If I meant to play Chopsticks, I would have played Chopsticks.

And the organ pipes, whether metal or wood, are made precisely. Each is an individual musical instrument; the myriad joins together in chorus. Metal is cut with perfectly square corners so the joints and seams fit exactly. Solder seams are straight and even. The “cut up” of the pipe mouths is executed exactly. You might use saws and files for the mouths of huge 16-footers, but the mouths of the top notes of a 2-foot stop are less than a quarter-inch wide. Only the tiniest blade, with the pointiest point and the sharpest edge, can make such a cut. And if that blade is not made of good tool steel, you’ll spend all your time sharpening and have no time left for cutting. The voicer’s fingers are firm and strong, cutting through the fine metal like a surgeon.

A fine pipe organ represents the height of human achievement. Math, physics, and structural engineering all combine with simple fine craftsmanship. Every cut of a piece of wood or metal contributes to the stability, reliability, and majesty of the instrument. The people who made the tools are as much a part of the music as those who built the organ, or the musician who plays it. It all starts with the toolmaker’s tools. ν

Notes

1. Boston natives know I-95 as Route 128. It was built in the 1920s, and in 1951, 27 miles of the road was opened as a limited-access highway. Since then it has been in a constant state of expansion. It was the first limited-access circumferential highway in the United States. In the 1960s, there was a plan to build a new highway directly through the center of Boston, linking I-95 coming from Providence, Rhode Island, and points south to Florida with I-95 heading north through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, into Maine. But in the 1970s, a moratorium on new highway construction was enacted, and Route 128 was renamed as I-95, using the circumferential route to link the two ends of I-95. Natives still call it 128.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Don’t blame the tools
The carpenter is finishing a house. He’s carefully measuring and mitering baseboards, windowsills, and doorjambs. He’s distracted by a mosquito, and his hammer glances the nail creating a carpenter’s rosette. The first thing he does is look at the head of the hammer—must be some glue on it or something.
The same carpenter needs to make one quick cut. He draws a square line on the board and picks up his handsaw. The saw veers to starboard. The first thing he does is look at the saw. Must be dull.
Or he measures a piece with a folding wooden ruler. He makes his mark and cuts his piece, but he didn’t unfold the ruler all the way—the inch markings skip from 13 to 26 and the piece is a foot too short. The first guy to come up with a wood-lengthener or wood-widener is going to make a fortune.
Organbuilders typically have many more tools than most tradesmen because our trade comprises so many facets. Of course, we have lots of woodworking tools, but we also have tools for leather, soft metal, hard metal, electrical work, and some ingenious rigs specific to pipe organs such as pallet spring pliers, tuning cones, toe cones and toehole reamers, and a wide assortment of nasty-looking little spades and prickers for voicing organ pipes.
When I’m working on a job site installing, tuning, or repairing organs, I carry a canvas sailmaker’s tool bag that measures about 8 by 16 inches and 12 inches high when fully loaded. It’s got 24 pockets on its sides and ends that surround a big central cavity. I like this format because you don’t need extra space to open it. Carry a steel toolbox up onto an organ walkboard and you need twice the space for the open lid. I keep it organized so that each tool has a pocket (some pockets have a half-dozen tools in them), and when I’m squeezed in a dark corner in an organ I can put my hands on many of my tools without looking at the bag. When co-workers borrow tools from me, I ask them to leave them on the floor next to the bag so my system doesn’t get messed up.
This morning I unloaded my car after a weeklong trip to one of our job sites, and all my toolboxes are on the long workbench in my shop. I wonder as I write just what’s in the favorite sailmaker’s bag, so I’ll take everything out and count. My everyday tool kit includes:
• 15 screwdrivers (no two alike, including ratchets, stubbies, offsets, straight, Phillips, or Robertson drive—I hope there’s never a screw I can’t reach)
• 2 wire cutters (fine for circuit boards, heavy for larger wires)
• 2 pairs long-nosed pliers (small and large)
• Flat-billed pliers
• Round-nosed pliers (for bending circles and hooks in wire)
• Double-acting linesman pliers (strong enough to let me bend bar steel in my hands, though the last pair broke in half when I did that)
• 1 pair slip-joint pliers
• 2 pairs vise-grips (one small, one long-nosed)
• Sears Robo-grip pliers (inherited from my father-in-law’s kit)
• 6″ adjustable wrench
• 2 sets Allen keys (English and metric)
• 2 pairs of scissors (one specially sharp, one general use)
• 6″ awl
• Tapered reamer
• 3 hemostats (two curved, one straight, for gripping tiny wires)
• Wire stripper (American Wire Gauge 16 through 26)
• 2 flashlights (large and small with spare batteries)
• 2 saws (one reversible back saw, one “harp” hack saw with replacement blades)
• 2 cheap chisels (3/4″ and 1″)
• 35-watt soldering iron and solder (for wiring)
• Electric test light
• 6 alligator clip leads
• Small hammer (my maul-wielding colleagues call it my “Geppetto” hammer)
• 2 rulers (one 35′ tape measure, one 72″ folding rule)
• 2 utility knives (light and heavy)
• 10 files (flat, half-round, round, big-medium-tiny)
• 3 tuning irons
• Pallet spring pliers
• 2.5-millimeter hex-nut driver (for Huess nuts)
• Wind pressure gauge
• 2 rolls black vinyl tape
• Sharpies, ballpoint pens, pencils
• Sharpened putty knife
• Spool of galvanized steel wire (for quick repairs)
• Bottle of Titebond glue
• Tubes of epoxy
• 5 small brushes
And there’s a canvas tool-roller with 35 little pokers, prickers, burnishers, spades, spoons, a bunch of little rods for raising languids, wire twisters, magnets, special keyboard tools, and an A=440 tuning fork.
I often ship this bag on airplanes, wrapping it in a blanket and stuffing it in a duffel bag—checked baggage, of course—and I dread losing it. It would take weeks to reconstruct this tool kit.
In the back of the car I carry three other larger toolboxes, with cordless drills, bit and driver sets, and heavier hammers, multimeter, etc., etc., etc. There’s a big plastic box with 40 dividers for wiring supplies, and another full of “organy” odds-’n’-ends like leather nuts and Huess nuts, felt and paper keyboard punchings, a few spare chest magnets, and some old piano ivories. And finally, a cardboard box full of pieces of leather and felt of almost any description—any large scrap from a workbench project goes into that box.
And I’m always missing something.

Organ transplants
Now that you know what my tool bag looks like, here’s a story that makes me wonder. I got a Saturday call from one of my clients, a large Roman Catholic church with a big organ in the rear gallery. The organ wouldn’t start and there were two Masses that afternoon. I knocked on the door of the rectory to get the key for the organ loft and was greeted by a teenage girl who was volunteering to answer the parish phones on the weekend. She called a priest’s extension and said, “The organ guy is here.”
The priest was a tall, dignified, elderly man, who came down the stairs, invited me into a parlor, and offered me a seat. I carried my tool bag with me and set it on the floor next to my chair. He asked two or three questions before I realized he thought I had something to do with a human organ donation program. I set him straight as politely as I could, asking for the keys to the organ loft while wondering what in the world he thought I was going to do with those tools!

Tool renewal
When I was first running around the countryside tuning organs, the “land line” was our only means of communication. You had to get all your service visits arranged in advance, and if a day’s plan changed because a sexton forgot to turn on the heat, I’d look for a pay phone at a gas station. Now of course we all have phones in our pockets. I usually have mine with me in an organ, not because I intend to interrupt my work taking calls, but because it has a notepad and a voice-memo system that allow me to keep notes while on the job. If I realize I’m missing a tool, I’m out of glue, or I don’t have any fresh batteries along, I make a note, and every couple weeks I spend an hour with my tools, replenishing supplies, sharpening blades, and keeping things in order.

Tool envy
There are many clever people working in tool design—every time I go into a hardware store I notice some neat little innovation: the cordless drill-screwdriver with a little headlight that lights when you pull the trigger; the 4-in-1, then 8-in-1, then 10-in-1 screwdriver (I carry one of those in my briefcase); the little rubber octagonal washer that goes on the end of the flashlight to keep it from rolling. And boy, are they tempting. I buy a ten-dollar hand tool because it’s cool and stuff it in my tool bag. Every now and then there has to be a culling. I guess it’s good news that tools break and wear out. It gives me an excuse to buy new ones.
When I was a hotshot apprentice in Ohio, I bought a fancy set of chisels by mail order. These were the Marples beauties, with maple handles, iron ferrules, and Sheffield steel blades. I paid about a hundred dollars for the set of nine—a huge amount of money for me in 1978. (Those were the years when good new large organs cost $5000 per stop!) I was enough of a beginner that my mentor teased me, saying all I needed now was some wood. But I still have those chisels, and I still have the racks I made to hang them on the wall over my bench. They’re the only workshop chisels I’ve ever owned, and while some of them are a little shorter than they used to be, they sharpen just as easily as when they were new. The iron ferrules mean you can hit the handle pretty hard with a mallet without damaging the tool. They are old friends.
By the way, also hanging on the wall over my bench in that shop was a display of my mistakes, hung there by my mentor to keep me humble. I think they’re still there.
When I started the Bishop Organ Company in 1987, I bought a Rockwell-Delta 10″ table saw—it’s known as a “Uni-Saw” and it must be one of the most popular table saw models ever made. The blade can be tilted to make angled cuts, and there’s a crosscut miter gauge that allows me to cut angled ends of boards. Over more than 20 years, I’ve cut miles of wood with it, and only last month I had the first trouble with it. The arbor bearings had finally worn out, and I found a local industrial supply company that was able to replace the bearings quickly. It was such a pleasure to use my saw again with the new bearings that I treated it to a new Freud carbide-tipped blade.

A reflection of attitude
The organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook was most active in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century. There’s a legend handed down through generations of workers there that in order to be hired to work in the factory an applicant had to present his toolbox for inspection. In the days before Sears, Home Depot, Woodworker’s Warehouse, Woodcraft Supply, Duluth Trading Company, McMaster-Carr, and Grainger, a woodworker built himself a box to store and transport his tools. Remaining examples show infinite attention to detail, with special drawers and cubbies designed for each specific tool, fancy dovetail joints, and hidden compartments. The worker that could produce such a masterpiece could build anything required in an organ shop.
Recently I noticed that Lowe’s was featuring a new line of mechanics’ toolboxes. These were not the little boxes you’d carry around, but monumental affairs with dozens of steel drawers on ball-bearing slides and heavy-duty casters. Some were five and six feet wide and just as tall. Fully loaded they’d weigh a ton or more. I’ve seen things like these for years in mechanics’ service bays and I have a more modest version in my shop, but I’d never seen a toolbox with a built-in refrigerator! Not a bad idea, though.
You may have seen the traveling salesmen who peddle tools to mechanics. The companies are Snap-On, Cornwell, and Matco, among others. A heavy mobile tool showroom pulls up to a service station and the mechanics all come out to shop. The driver is a franchise owner who travels a regular route of customers. He extends credit to his customers, allowing them to make cash payments each week so the wives never learn how much money the guys are spending on tools. And the Snap-On driver is likely to be armed. He’s carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools that every mechanic would love to own.

A tool for every purpose
I take a lot of pleasure in my tools. I know, I know—it’s a guy thing, as my wife often mentions (though her weaving habit depends on an in-house service department!). But maintaining a comprehensive and effective tool kit is essential to good organbuilding. We say don’t blame the tools, but we cannot work without them. It’s a simple pleasure to draw a sharp knife along a straight edge to cut a neat piece of leather. I enjoy the sound and sight of plane shavings curling off my workpiece onto my hands and wrists, littering the workbench and floor with aromatic twists. It brings to mind the cute little Christmas dolls made from plane shavings in places like Switzerland—Saint Nicolas with a curly beard of cedar shavings. Moving the languid of an organ pipe to achieve good musical speech, soldering wires to a row of pins that wind up looking like a row of jewels, gluing goat-skin gussets to the corners of a reservoir are all motions repeated countless times that I don’t take for granted and can’t repeat without my tools. When I use someone else’s tools they feel funny in my hands.
Sometimes I’m asked how we can maintain patience to complete a project that might take a year or more. Easy—every day you take satisfaction in each little thing you make. A finished organ comprises thousands of those little projects blended into a unified whole. Listening to an instrument brings back the memories of each satisfying cut, each problem solved, and of course each mistake. My tools are my companions and my helpers. They’ve been with me to almost every American state and as far abroad as Madagascar. Right now they’re all spread out on my workbench for a photo shoot, but they’ll be back at work on Monday morning. 

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

Most faucets and spigots have rubber washers that act as gaskets. When you turn off a faucet, the washer is compressed, sealing the opening to the pipe and stopping the flow of water. If you turn faucets too hard when shutting off the water, you compress the washer more than necessary—not too big a deal, except the washer will squish and wear out more quickly.

The smooth operation of your automobile’s engine is all about controlling leaks. Piston rings, which are metal washers that seal the pistons against the cylinder walls, isolate the combustion chamber above the pistons from the lubrication of the piston rods and crankshaft. When the rings fail, the oil from below splashes up into the combustion, and now you’re “burning oil.” That’s what’s going on when excessive black and stinky smoke is coming out of your tailpipe. You need a ring job.

Above that combustion chamber are the valves that open to allow the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor or injector in to be ignited by the spark plug, and those that open to allow the exhaust to escape after the cylinder fires. (I know, I know, you diesel guys are waving your arms in the air, saying “OO, OO, OO . . . ” We’ll talk about diesel combustion another day.)

The valves are operated by the camshaft, which is also lubricated by the engine oil. If the valves leak, fuel and exhaust can trade places, and the engine’s operation gets screwed up. You need a valve job.

Perhaps you’ve had car trouble caused by a worn timing belt. That belt turns the camshaft at just the right ratio to the engine’s revolutions, so that intake valves open, letting in the fuel before the spark plug ignites it, and exhaust valves open after the firing, letting the exhaust out. My car’s engine has eight cylinders, and at highway speed, runs at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, which is 41.6 revolutions a second. All eight cylinders fire with each revolution, so there are 332.8 valve openings (and closings) each second. That’s cutting things pretty close. But we sure expect that engine to start every time, and to run like a clock hour after hour. Say you’re driving three and a half hours from New York to Boston. To get you there, you’re asking for 4,193,280 precisely timed valve repetitions. It’s a wonder it works at all.

It’s all about the holes.

I like to describe the art of organ building as knowing where to put the holes. Organbuilding workshops include immense collections of drill bits. My set of multi-spurs goes from half-inch to three-inches. They graduate in 64ths up to one inch, 32nds up to one-and-a-half, 16ths to two-and-a-half, and 8ths up to three inches. I have two sets of “numbered” bits (1-60 and 1-80), one of twist drills from 1/16 to one-inch, graduated by 64ths, and one set of “lettered” bits (A–Z).

If you’re interested in knowing more about those sets, follow this link: www.engineersedge.com/drill_sizes.html. You’ll find a chart that shows the numbered, lettered, and fractional sizes compared to ten-thousands of an inch: #80 is .0135″, #1 is .228″, just under ¼″ (which is .250). If you have all three sets, and mine are all packed in one big drill index, you’re covered up to nearly half an inch in tiny graduations. 

Why so fussy? Say you’re building tracker action parts, and you’re going to use #10 (B&S Gauge) phosphor bronze wire (.1018) as a common axle. You want the axle to be tight enough so there’s minimal slop (no one likes a rattly action), but loose enough for reliable free movement. A #38 drill bit is .1015 B&S Gauge—too tight by 3/1000s. Next one bigger is #37, .1040″. That’s a margin of 22/1000s, the closest I can get with my sets of bits.

And there are lots of holes.

Lots of the holes in our organs allow the passage of wind pressure. In the Pitman windchests found in most electro-pneumatic organs, there are toe-holes that the pipes sit on and rackboard holes that support them upright. There are holes that serve as seats for primary and secondary valves. There are channels bored in the walls of the chests to allow the exhausting of pouches and there are exhaust ports in the magnets. All of those holes, except in the rackboards, have valves pressed against them to stop the flow of air. 

Let’s take that a step further. A fifty-stop organ has over 3,000 pipes. That’s 3,000 pipe valves. If that organ has seven manual windchests (two in the Great, two in the Swell, two in the Choir, and one in the Solo), that’s 427 primary valves, 427 secondary valves, and 427 magnet exhaust ports, in addition to the pipe valves. There’s one Pitman chest in the Pedal (Spitz Flute 8′, Gedackt 8′, Chorale Bass 4′, Rauschpfeife III) with 32 of each. And there are three independent unit chests in the Pedal with 56 of each. Oh, wait. I forgot the stop actions, 50 times 3. And the expression motors, eight stages each, 16 times 3. And two tremolos . . . That’s 9,162 valves. Not counting the expressions and tremolos, every one of those valves can cause a cipher (when a stop action ciphers, you can’t turn the stop off). 

How many notes do you play on a Sunday morning? The Doxology has 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. If you play it using 25 stops, that’s 3,200 notes, just for the Doxology! Are you playing that Widor Toccata for the postlude? There are 126 notes in the first measure. Using 25 stops? That’s 3,150 notes in the first measure! There are 61 measures. At 3,150 notes per measure, that’s 192,150 to finish the piece. (I haven’t counted the pedal part, and while the last three measures have big loud notes, there aren’t that many.) Using this math, you might be playing four or five hundred thousand notes in a busy service. And remember, in those Pitman chests, four valves operate for each note (magnet, primary, secondary, pipe valve), which means it takes 12,800 valve openings to play the Doxology, and 768,600 for the Widor. Let’s take a guess. With four hymns, some service music, an anthem or two, plus prelude and postlude, you might play 1,750,000 valves on a Sunday. (Lots more if your organ still has the original electro-pneumatic switching machines.) No ciphers today? Organ did pretty good. It’s a wonder it works at all.

Next time the personnel committee sits you down for a performance review, be sure to point out that you play 500,000 notes each Sunday morning.

Dust devils

Pull a couch away from the wall and you’ll find a herd of dust bunnies. Messy, but innocent enough, unless someone in your household is allergic to dust. But dust is a real enemy of the pipe organ. Fire is bad, water is bad, vandalism is bad, but dust is the evil lurker that attacks when you least expect it. A fleck of sawdust coming loose inside a windchest, left from when the organ was built, finds its way onto a pipe valve, and you’ve got a cipher.

Imagine this ordinary day in the life of a church. The organist is practicing, and the custodian is cleaning up in the basement. Airborne dust is sucked through the intake of the organ blower, and millions of potential cipher-causing particles waft through the wind ducts, through the reservoirs, and into the windchests, there to lurk until the last measure of the Processional March of the wedding of the daughter of the Chair of the Board of Trustees—whose family gave the money for the new organ. One pesky fleck hops onto the armature of the magnet of “D” (#39) of the Trompette-en-Chamade, and the last of Jeremiah’s notes continues into oblivion. (Ciphers never happen in the Aeoline when no one is around!)

I’m thinking about valves—how they work, what they do, what are their tolerances, and how many times they repeat to accomplish what we expect—because I was recently asked to provide an estimate for the cost of covering and protection of a large pipe organ during a massive renovation of the interior of a church building. There are organ cases on either side of the huge west window, and another big organ chamber in the front of the church, forming the corner between transept and chancel. There are lots of mixtures, and plenty of reeds—and with something like 3,500 pipes, a slew of valves.

The stained-glass west window will be removed for restoration, and the general contractor will construct a weather-tight box to close the hole. That’ll be quite a disturbance for the organ, with its Trompette-en-Chamade and mixture choruses. The plaster walls will be sanded and painted. The wooden ceiling with its complex system of trusses and beams will be cleaned and refinished. The entire nave, transept, and chancel will be filled with scaffolding, complete with a “full deck” 40 feet up, which will serve as a platform for all that work on the ceiling.

To properly protect a pipe organ against all that, removing the pipes, taping over the toeholes, and covering the windchests with hardboard and plastic is an important precaution. That means that all those little valves cannot be exposed to the dust and disturbance around the organ. To do that, you have to vacuum the chest surfaces, and organbuilders know how to do that without shoveling dust directly into the pipe holes.

The pipes that are enclosed in an expression chamber can be left in place if you disconnect the shutters, and seal the shutters closed with gaffer’s tape and plastic. Even, then, all the reeds should be removed, packed, and safely stored. 

The blower is the best way for foreign stuff to get inside the guts of the organ. It’s essential to prepare the organ blower for the building renovation. Wrap the blower’s air intake securely with plastic and heavy tape. Those 42-gallon “contractor” trash bags are great for this. And cut the power to the blower motor by closing circuit breakers, to be sure that it cannot be inadvertently started. Before you put the blower back into service, give the room a good cleaning, and allow a day or two for the dust to settle before you run the blower. It’s a simple precaution, but really important.

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It’s a lot of work to do all this to a big pipe organ. And it’s a lot more work to put it all back together and tune it. For the same amount of money you could buy a brand-new Steinway Concert Grand piano if it’s a big organ. But if you fail to do this, the future reliability of the organ may be seriously compromised. 

A bit of dust gets into a toehole, and winds up sitting on the note valve. Even if the valve is held open a tiny slit, the resulting trickle of air is enough to make a pipe whimper. A fleck of dust gets caught in the armature of a magnet, and the note won’t stop sounding. And I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how tiny, almost invisible a fleck is enough to do that. Lots of organ reed pipes, especially trumpets, are shaped like funnels, and they aggressively collect as much dust as they can. A little speck jolted off the inside of a reed resonator falls through the block and gets caught between the tongue and shallot. No speech.

To the hard-hat wearing, cigar-chewing general contractor, the organbuilder seems like a ninny, fussing about specks of dust. To the member of the vestry that must vote in favor of a huge expenditure to do with flecks of dust, the organbuilder seems like a carpetbagger, trying to sneak an expensive job out of thin air. To the organbuilder, the idea of all that activity, all that disturbance, all that dirt, all those vibrations, and all those workers with hammers, coffee cups, and sandwich wrappings swarming about the organ brings visions of worship made mockery, week after week, by an organ whose lungs are full of everything unholy.

Think about Sunday morning with Widor, Old Hundredth, and all the other festivities, think about valves opening and closing by the millions, and don’t tell me that “a little dust” isn’t going to hurt anything.

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This lecture is about caring for an organ during building renovation. If your church is planning to sand and refinish the floor, paint the walls and ceiling, replace the carpets (hope not!), or install a new heating and air conditioning system, be sure that the people making the decisions know about protecting the organ from the beginning. Your organ technician can help with advice, and any good organbuilder will be available and equipped to accomplish this important work for you. Any good-quality pipe organ of moderate size has a replacement value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If yours is a three-manual organ with fifty stops, big enough to have a 32-foot stop, it’s likely worth over a million. The congregation that owns it depends on its reliable operation. A simple oversight can be the end of the organ’s reliability.

When there is no building renovation planned, we can carry these thoughts into everyday life. Institutional hygiene is essential for the reliability of the organ. Remember the custodian sweeping in the basement while you’re practicing? Think of the staff member looking for a place to stow a bunch of folding chairs, finding a handy closet behind the sanctuary. That pile of chairs on the bellows of the organ raises the wind pressure and wrecks the tuning. Or those Christmas decorations leaning up against those strange-looking machines—the roof timbers of the crèche may be leaning against a primary valve. You turn on the organ, draw a stop, and a note is playing continually. Organ technicians usually charge for their travel time. It could be a $300 service call for the right person to realize that a broomstick needs to be moved!

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When I hear a great organ playing, I often think of those valves in motion. The organist plays a pedal point on the 32′ Bourdon while improvising during Communion, and in my mind’s eye, I can see a five-inch valve held open, with a hurricane of carefully regulated wind blowing into an organ pipe that weighs 800 pounds. A few minutes later, the organist gives the correct pause after the Benediction, swings into a blazing toccata, and thousands of valves open and close each second. Amazing, isn’t it?

Releathering and repairing pneumatic windchests, I’ve made countless valves myself. I know just what they look like and what they feel like. I like to dust them with talcum powder to keep them from sticking years down the road, and I picture what they smell like—the smell of baby powder mingling with the hot-glue pot. Hundreds of times during service calls or renovation jobs, I’ve opened windchests and seen just how little it takes to make a note malfunction. I’ve seen organ blowers located in the filthiest, stinkiest, rodent-filled, dirt-floored, moldy sumps. I’ve seen the everyday detritus of church life—hymnals, vestments, decorations, rummage-sale signs, and boxes of canned goods piled on organ walkboards and bellows, even dumped on windchests loaded with pipes. Can’t understand why the organ sounds so bad. 

Earlier this week, I visited an organ in which the static reservoir and blower were in a common storage space. A penciled sign was taped to the reservoir at chest height: “Please do not place anything on this unit. Sensitive parts of pipe organ. If you have any questions, see Norma.” When we say, “do not place anything,” how can there be questions?

To the untrained eye, the pipe organ may appear as a brute of a machine. But inside, it’s delicate and fragile. If “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in the wide world, cleanliness is the heart of reliability for the pipe organ. Institutional hygiene. Remember that.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

A material world
It happens to me all the time. A word or phrase comes up in conversation and a song pops into my head. I can’t help it, and I’m often stuck with that song for days and days. The insipid nature of some of the songs startles me—how can I justify the use of my Random Access Memory on such drivel?

Five passengers set sail that day…
polished up the handle of the big front door…
no gale that blew dismayed her crew…
the soda water fountain…
many a mile to go that night before he reached the town-oh, the town-oh, the town-oh…

And let’s not forget the jolly swagman, the girl named Fred, the mule named Sal, and the glorious, sonorous, stentorian Pirate King. (Dear readers, if you know all of these songs, let me know—honor system—and I’ll send you an autographed manuscript of this column.)
We are in the last few weeks of a busy and exciting organ installation. I’m spending a lot of time with supply catalogues, shepherding the flow of materials to the jobsite, trying to keep ahead of the energetic crew as we navigate the final glide-path. (The job is in New York City, and as I come and go, I drive along Manhattan’s western shore on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Speaking of free association, “glide-path” makes me think of Captain Sullenberger’s heroic goose-inspired glide-path over the George Washington Bridge, landing a US Airways jet on those choppy waters.)
But it’s the materials I’m thinking about these days, and I’m stuck with material girl… So sings the ubiquitous and peripatetic Madonna in a song I don’t know. The fact that I don’t know the song doesn’t stop it from circling menacingly between my ears. Material Girl must be second only to Michael Jackson’s Bad in songs in which the highest proportion of the lyrics is the actual title. (You can find the complete words of both at www.azlyrics.com.) I spent $1.29 to download Material Girl from the lyrics is the actual title. (You can find the complete words of both at www.ilike.com as part of my research preparing for this column. (I’ve filed the e-mail receipt for tax purposes!)
My catalogues each have more than 3,000 pages and the consistency of bellows weights. They offer everything from sponges to forklifts, from welders to furniture polish, from pulleys to lubricants to fasteners to shelving to eyewash stations. A list gets shouted down from the organ loft, and a rattles-when-you-shake-it box arrives the next day.
As I unpack the boxes, I reflect on the huge variety of stuff that goes into a pipe organ. It’s part of what’s wonderful about the instrument. We use geological materials (metals and lubricants), vegetable materials (wood), animal materials (ivory, bone, leather, and glue), chemical materials (glues, solvents, finishes)—and I think most organ builders have intimate and personal relationships with many of them.

From the forest
Most organbuilding workshops include plenty of woodworking equipment. The overwhelming smells come from wood—an experienced woodworker can tell by the smell what variety of wood was milled last. It’s impossible to mix up the smell of white oak (burning toast) with that of cedar or spruce (grandmother’s closet). And the working characteristics of various woods are as different as their smells.
White oak is very popular among organbuilders. It can be milled to produce myriad grain patterns, it has great structural qualities, and it takes finishes beautifully. But it’s a difficult material to work with. In 1374 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in Troilus and Criseyde, “as an ook cometh of a litel spyr [sapling].” We now say, “mighty oaks from little acorns grow,” referring to great things coming from small beginnings. The mighty oak tree is a symbol of strength and stability and of the witness of many passing generations. How many memoirs or novels include the enduring oak tree as the observer, commentator, and guardian of generations of family members?
There was a magnificent and massive oak tree in the yard of my great-grandmother’s house that was known as the “roller-skate tree” by generations of my family. It was so bulky and heavy that several of the major lower limbs had settled to rest on the ground—the ultimate climbing tree for kids, as you could simply walk from the grass to a great height. Some imaginative arborist conceived of building heavy iron-wheeled skids under those limbs so the natural motion of the tree would not harm them as they dragged on the ground.
As the white oak tree is such a massive presence, so it yields its beauty reluctantly. The rough-cut lumber is uncomfortable to handle. It’s heavy—the weight-per-board-foot is higher than most other woods. When the truck arrives from the lumberyard, you’re faced with an hour of heavy and prickly work. And when the mighty tree is felled and milled, the apparent inherent stability transforms into a wild release of tension. As the wood passes through the saw it twists and turns, scorching itself against the spinning blade, and producing the characteristic smell. (By the way, a French government website claims that master Parisian organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was the inventor of the circular saw.)
As you look at a standing tree, you can tell a great deal about the wood inside. If the bark shows straight, even, perpendicular lines, you can assume that there’s plenty of nice, straight lumber in there. If the bark is twisted, spiraling around the tree, you know you’re going to be fighting for each useful board.
Red oak is a poor substitute for white oak. The grain patterns are not as attractive, and red oak doesn’t take finishes as well. And it’s not as strong. Cut a piece of red oak a half-inch square and four inches long. Put it in your mouth and blow through it into a glass of water. You can blow bubbles—there are longitudinal capillaries in the wood that deny it the structural strength of its mighty cousin. Try the same experiment with white oak and the sharp edges will cut your lips.
White oak saves its final insult: splinters. The hardness of the wood combines with that tendency to move to produce angry splinters. And like the woods from tropical rainforests whose survival depends on producing gallons of insecticide in the form of sap, there’s a chemical content to a piece of white oak that fosters festering—the wounds from the splinters easily get infected. So a contract for a new organ with a case made of white oak should include a supply of aloe-enriched hand lotion.
The opposite end of the hardwood spectrum is basswood. It’s from the genus Tilia and is also referred to as Linden, the source of Franz Schubert’s song, Der Lindenbaum. It’s a large deciduous tree, as tall as a hundred feet, with leaves as big as eight inches across. And the wood is like butter. It smells sweet coming through the saw, it is easy to mill straight, and once it’s straight it stays there. It’s ideal for making keyboards, because keyboards are about the last part of an organ where we can tolerate warpage. And it’s ideal for carvings, statues, and pipe shades. A sharp tool coaxes even and smooth shavings—you can’t call them chips. It reminds me of the butter molded into little pineapples in trying-to-be-fancy restaurants.
With all the pleasant qualities of basswood, it’s not very strong—no good for structural pieces—and it’s so soft that if you look at it wrong there will be a ding in the surface. While it looks beautiful unfinished, it does not have the attractive grain patterns we look for when we use clear finishes like stain, lacquer, or varnish. On the other hand, it takes paint and gold leaf very well indeed.
I place poplar right between white oak and basswood. It’s strong, relatively hard, mills and sands easily, and smells good. Its grain is not pretty enough to recommend it for use as casework with clear finish, and although poplar is essentially a white wood, it has broad swatches of dark olive-green heartwood. But all its other qualities make it ideal for use building windchests and other components, including painted cases.

From the farmyard
While woodworking is common to many arts and crafts besides organbuilding, leather (at least in any large volume) is more specific to our field. Besides its industrial uses (shoes, clothing, and car seats), leather is used only in small quantities. So, while there are plenty of skilled woodworkers producing furniture and household or office appointments like cabinets and bookshelves, organbuilders stand pretty much alone as large-scale consumers of leather. And those industrial users don’t care much about how long the leather will last. After all, except for the decades-old and beloved leather flight jacket, most of us don’t expect shoes, clothes, or car seats to last more than five or ten years.
Ten years would be a disastrously short lifetime for organ leather, and organbuilders have made effective and concerted efforts to ensure a good supply of leather, tanned according to ancient methods, that will have a long lifetime.
A busy organ shop routinely stocks the tanned hides of cows, horses, goats, and sheep. Cowhide can be produced with a hard slick finish (useful for action bearing points and rib belts on reservoirs) or as soft and supple material for small pneumatics and reservoir gussets (the flexible corner pieces). We also often use goatskin for those gussets. I think goatskin is tougher than cowhide, perhaps an opinion reflecting my comparison of scrappy pugnacious goats and relatively docile cows. Goatskin is supple even when it’s very thick, which makes it ideal for applications requiring plenty of strength and flexibility at the same time.
Horsehide is very strong, but it’s spongy and not supple at all, so its principal use is for gaskets between joints that we expect to be opened for maintenance of an organ. Cutting it into strips and punching out the screw holes prepares it for making gaskets for windchest bungs, removable bottom boards, and reservoir top panels. It’s a good idea to apply a light coating of baby powder or light grease (like Vaseline) to the leather before screwing down the panel to keep it from absorbing oils and resins from the wood, which act as unwelcome glue.
I use more sheepskin than anything else. Our supplier is equipped to plane it to various thicknesses, a process that produces splits as “useful waste.” The raw skin might be a tenth of an inch thick, and we might want leather for pouches and small pneumatics to be one or two hundredths of an inch thick. That leaves us with leather eight or nine hundredths thick, fuzzy on both sides, relatively inexpensive because it’s technically waste, and useful for plenty of things like light gaskets and stoppers of wooden pipes.
As I cut the hides of any of these creatures into organ parts, I’m aware of the animal’s anatomy. When a hide is laid flat on a workbench, you clearly see the neck and legs of the animal, and to make good reliable pneumatics you need to be careful of the natural stretching of the armpits, the belly, and the rump—those places where our skin grows in tight curves and stretches every time we move. When I cut long strips, I cut parallel to the spine to ensure relatively even thickness through the piece. If you cut a piece from belly-edge to belly-edge, it will go from thin to thick to thin again.
When releathering reservoirs, we cut miles of strips of leather or laminated rubber cloth that are around an inch-and-a-half wide. I remember keeping a dedicated straight piece of wood as a cutting surface and a long wooden straightedge as a rule for cutting these strips. I sharpened and honed my favorite knife as though I meant to shave with it. With that set-up, it took plenty of skill and care to produce straight pieces of material. The knife wanted to follow the grain of the wood, and after a few cuts my cutting board was scored, providing more opportunities for my knife to stray. Today, we have rubbery-plastic cutting surfaces, plastic and aluminum straightedges marked in inches or centimeters, and laser-sharpened rotary knives with retractable blades. With proper care, the cutting surface can be maintained blemish-free indefinitely. The knife blades are replaceable, and it’s easy to cut hundreds of near-perfect strips. All this special gear is available in fabric stores. I’m usually the only man in the store when I go in to buy replacement blades. I have to navigate aisles of unfamiliar stuff essential for quilting, sewing, decorating, scrapbooking (an activity described by a verb that can’t be more than a few years old), and countless other arts and crafts activities.
A recent side effect of this quest was my discovery of monster pipe-cleaners of every size and description, up to two feet long and an inch in diameter, perfect for stopping off pipes as I tune mixtures. Between those and the fantastic laser-sharpened cutting tools, I can’t imagine how I ever did organbuilding without fabric stores.
We’ve done forest and field—someday soon we’ll talk about mines and quarries. As the technology of tools develops, we are able to work with an ever-wider variety of metals. We’re used to the tin-lead alloys we use to make most of our organ pipes, but we find more steel and aluminum used for structural elements, action parts, even casework decoration. All the skills required to work this wide range of materials complement those skills related to the organ’s music—voicing, tuning, acoustic planning—and the planning of the projects in the first place—architecture, and yes, politics. Now there’s a subject for another day.