In the wind . . .

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. 

Technology widens the rift.

The other day while running around the house getting ready for work, I heard snips of a story on National Public Radio about the death of Australia’s last veteran of World War I. I missed the man’s name and didn’t hear how old he was, but it’s safe to guess that he was born sometime around 1900. I reflected on the dramatic march of history encompassed by his lifetime, and I recalled a conversation with my grandfather shortly after astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off a metal ladder onto the surface of the moon. That wise and lovely old man pointed out that his lifetime spanned a comprehensive history of transportation from horse-drawn carts to space travel.

As I write this afternoon, I type my thoughts into a laptop with a twenty-two gigabyte hard drive. I’m no computer historian, but I’m sure that NASA didn’t use a machine as powerful as mine to guide Mr. Armstrong’s route. In fact, I suspect that a lot of the calculating was done with slide rules. My work with the Organ Clearing House involves the management of thousands of photographs so my twenty-gig hard drive is full. I solved that problem by purchasing a sixty-gig supplemental drive. It’s the size of a Band-Aid® box and cost about $150. Navigation involves spherical trigonometry. It’s tricky enough to do those calculations on earth, crossing an ocean for example—it’s exponentially more complicated to navigate between celestial bodies when one is orbiting the other and both are orbiting the sun. How can it be that I need more computing power and memory to manage my organbuilding career than was available for celestial navigation forty years ago?

When President Richard Nixon was defending himself against an impeachment inquiry in the early 1970s, he and those around him were manipulating transcripts of the infamous taped conversations that were being used to implicate him. We read that it took a platoon of secretaries working through the night to retype a transcript in time for a court-appointed submission deadline when a passage was to be deleted in the interest of deceiving the public. This afternoon when I look back on a previous paragraph and have second thoughts all I have to do is highlight and delete. How can it be that I have more stenographic power on my desk than the collective resources of the Nixon White House?

Where are we, anyway?

When I was growing up I loved riding in the car watching the countryside go by. After a childhood and adolescence of looking out the window while your parents did the driving, you’d have a good idea of where you were going when you finally could drive yourself. But now when you shop for a new car you’re surprised to see how many models are supplied with video screens and DVD players. Of course we need those video systems to keep the kids quiet so we can talk on the phone. The logical continuation of this illogical progression is that we can anticipate a generation of new drivers who have no idea where they are going. They’ll have to be taught the meaning of a stop sign or a traffic light. They might not know the way from their home to their school. And they’ve been deprived of thousands of hours of conversation with their parents, siblings, and friends. The good news is that car makers have anticipated this problem. Long before those lost young drivers sit behind the wheel for the first time they’ll be used to satellite navigation. Why strain your eyes looking out the window when you can have a pixilated map on a dashboard screen?

Several years ago my son participated as a crew member competing in a popular annual sailboat race from Cape Cod to Bermuda. There were around a hundred-eighty boats from many different classes so the race officials used a handicap system to level the field, allowing slower boats a mathematical advantage. A further feature of the handicapping system allowed an advantage to those skippers who navigated by the stars without the aid of global positioning satellites and other sophisticated devices. Imagine using a sextant to figure out where you are in mid-ocean when for a few hundred dollars you can have an electronic gizmo that would do it for you. If you’re going to go to all that trouble to know how to do something, shouldn’t you be rewarded for it? (By the way, Mike was in a boat with a sextant!)
In an Op-Ed column in the New York Times of Sunday, October 16, 2005, Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Edmund Morris commented on the recent discovery of the original manuscript of Beethoven’s transcription for piano, four hands of his Grosse Fuge, originally written for string quartet. Mr. Morris began the column by saying that his first reaction to hearing this news was
an aching desire to see it. . . . Beethoven’s manuscripts are revelatory, because he was an intensely physical person who fought his music onto the page, splattering ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper in the process. Not for him the serene penmanship of J. S. Bach, whose undulant figurations sway like ship masts over calm seas, or the hasty perfection of Mozart, or the quasi-mathematical constructs of Webern. Their writing is the product of minds already made up.


As he continues, Mr. Morris laments society’s progress away from the authentic process of creating art:
It is already a given that many young architects can’t draw, relying on circuitry to do their imaging for them. . . . Recently my wife and I bought a country house designed by just such an architect. It looked great until we discovered that the main floor sagged in the middle because it lacked the kind of central support that a child, 40 years ago, would have sensed was necessary in the foundation.


Forty years ago, I could have been that child. I credit much of my understanding of load-bearing support, hoisting and rigging, and mechanical advantage to Christmas packages that contained Erector Sets®, Tinker Toys®, Lincoln Logs®, or Legos® just the way I base my knowledge of local geography and my sense of direction on looking out the window of the car when I was child. (Now my wife accuses me of navigating by steeples because I can find my way through unfamiliar neighborhoods using as landmarks the distant steeples of churches where I have worked.) Have you heard about the structural principal of the triangle as a rigid physical form? Assemble a square using four Erector Set® beams of equal length, four bolts, and four nuts. You’ve made a form that you can easily collapse into something like a straight line. Add another piece to form a diagonal across the square. Now it’s two triangles and you can’t collapse it. Simple. (The same grandfather showed me that when I was little.) You don’t need an engineering degree or a computer with a CAD (computer-aided-design) program. You learned it the simple way and you’ll never forget it. Drive past a construction site where there’s a tall crane at work and wonder how it holds itself up. Easy—it’s nothing but a long string of triangles. Arrange your triangles into a succession of three-dimensional forms, and voila: a geodesic dome with thanks to Buckminster Fuller—a simple-to-build roof that can support a load of snow.

They don’t build ’em like they used to.

I know, I know—I sound like an old timer (I really did walk two miles to school every day!). But we who have built our lives around the pipe organ have a unique opportunity to rub shoulders with the good old days. I’ll always appreciate the lessons learned working on a venerable antique organ. While restoring an organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook, I was particularly impressed by the clarity of the workers’ pencil marks. Those pencils were so sharp that there was no discernable width to the line they left. Mark a mortise on a piece of wood with a pencil you’ve sharpened to a one-molecule point and you’ll certainly cut it just as clean with a chisel. In a modern organ shop, the same oilstone used to sharpen the knife that’s used to sharpen the pencil that’s used to mark the mortise is also used to sharpen the chisel that’s used to cut that mortise. That’s the way it used to be and that’s the way it is!
In fact, they do build them like they used to. Organbuilders commonly celebrate the completion of an organ in the workshop with a party—an “open house.” If you don’t happen to live near an organbuilder, plan ahead when you’re thinking of planning a vacation. Call several organ shops to ask if they have an open house coming up and plan your trip around it. If you’d like some hints, give me a call. You’ll be rewarded not only by seeing a brand-new instrument and meeting other organists and organbuilders, but you’ll certainly be able to get a sense of how ancient honored methods and traditions have been brought into the twenty-first century.

Remember the fundamentals.

When you attend that open house, you might learn the importance of reading the grain of a piece of wood before making it into part of the organ. Look at the end of a piece of wood and you’ll see the pattern we call end-grain. Sometimes you can see the circle of the tree’s rings, sometimes you see a flat pattern where the lines of the grain are parallel with the wide surface of the board, sometimes those lines are perpendicular to the wide side of the board. Draw a cross-section picture representing a tree’s growth rings with concentric circles, draw lines across it that represent boards cut out of the tree, and you’ll be able to figure how a raw tree can be milled to achieve a certain pattern. Why does this matter? Wood warps with the growth rings. In other words, when the end-grain pattern is parallel with the wide side of the board, the board will warp toward the wide side. Consider the keyboards and pallets of an organ with slider chests. If you as the organist could choose, you’d surely prefer to have keyboards warp up-and-down so the individual keys wouldn’t warp into each other and bind, and you’d surely prefer to have the pallets warp side-to-side leaving the gasketed surface flat against the windchest grid avoiding ciphers.

You can choose. Your organbuilder should make the keyboards using wood with the flat grain (often called slab grain). Pallets should be made using wood whose end-grain is perpendicular to the surface of the windchests. Your keyboards won’t stick, and your pallets won’t cipher. Remember the fundamentals.

Those thoughts on end-grain offer a glimpse into the art of making a pipe organ. Organbuilders combine natural and synthesized materials, adapt ancient forms and ideas and combine them with new. They work out the structural requirements of the instrument, computing how its weight is distributed and supported. They fill in the right number of squares with diagonals to make the triangles that keep the instrument’s structure from wobbling or falling. Perhaps their drawings look like Beethoven’s scores, rife with erasures, crossing-out, conflicting ideas. Or do they achieve “undulant figurations” (à la Bach), “quasi-mathematical constructs” (à la Webern) or, God forbid, “hasty perfection” (à la Mozart, whose mind was already made up)?

There’s a big gap between taking the long route and avoiding short cuts—and the right way is somewhere in between. Creating works of art—novels, plays, paintings, statues, musical performances, musical instruments—is strengthened by remembering the fundamentals. All are made possible by the pedagogy, the drudgery, and the excitement of early learning. There’s no substitute for learning the fundamentals. You cannot develop a credible view of the world and your place in it while watching DVDs in the back of the car.

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.

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.)

§

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.

§

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.

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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. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Measure up
When I was an apprentice working in Oberlin, Ohio, we had a particularly bad winter, with several heavy storms and countless days of difficult driving conditions. As part of our regular work, my mentor Jan Leek and I did a great deal of driving as we serviced organs throughout northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Jan owned a full-size Dodge van—perfect for our work as it was big enough to carry windchests, big crates of organ pipes, and long enough inside to carry a twelve-foot stepladder with the doors closed, if the top step was rested on the dashboard near the windshield. All those merits aside, it was relatively light for its size and the length of its wheelbase, and it was a simple terror to drive in the snow. There can’t have been another car so anxious to spin around.
Jan started talking about buying a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and one afternoon as we returned from a tuning, he turned into a car dealership and ordered a new Jeep Wagoneer—a large station wagon-shaped model. He wanted it to have a sunroof, but since Jeep didn’t offer one he took the car to a body shop that would install one as an aftermarket option. As we left the shop, Jan said to the guy, “I work with measurements all day—be sure it’s installed square.” It was.
Funny that an exchange like that would stick with me for more than thirty years, but it’s true—organbuilders work and live with measurements all day, every day they’re at work. A lifetime of counting millimeters or sixty-fourths-of-an-inch helps one develop an eye for measurements. You can tell the difference between 19 and 20 millimeters at a glance. A quick look at the head of a bolt tells you that it’s seven-sixteenths and not a half-inch, and you grab the correct wrench without thinking about it. Your fingers tell you that the thickness of a board is three-quarters and not thirteen-sixteenths before your eyes do. And if the sunroof is a quarter-inch out of square, it’ll bug you every time you get in the car.
And with the eye for measuring comes the need for accuracy as you measure. Say you’re making a panel for an organ case. It will have four frame members—top, bottom, and two sides—and a hardwood panel set into dados (grooves) cut into the inside edges. The drawing says that the outside dimensions are 1000mm (one meter) by 500mm (nice even numbers that never happen in real life!). The width of the frame members is 75mm. You need to cut the sides to 1000mm, as that’s the overall length of the panel. But the top and bottom pieces will fit between the two sides, so you subtract the combined width of the two sides from the length of the top and bottom and cut them accordingly: 500mm minus 75mm minus 75mm equals 350mm.
You make a mark on the board at 350mm—but your pencil is dull and your mark is 2mm wide. Not paying attention to the condition of the pencil or the actual placement of the mark, you cut the board on the “near” side of the mark and your piece winds up 4mm too short. The finished panel will be 496mm wide. Oh well, the gap will allow for expansion of the wood in the humid summer. But wait! It’s summer now. In the winter your panel will shrink to 492mm, and the organist will have to stuff a folded bulletin into the gap to keep the panel from rattling each time he plays low AAA# of the Pedal Bourdon (unless it’s raining).
You can see that when you mark a measurement on a piece of wood, you must make a neat clean mark, put it just at the right point according to your ruler, and remember throughout the process on which side of the mark you want to make your cut. If you know your mark is true and the length will be accurate if the saw splits your pencil mark, then split the pencil mark when you cut!
I’ve had the privilege of restoring several organs built by E. & G.G. Hook, and never stop delighting at the precision of the 150-year-old pencil marks on the wood. The boys in that shop on Tremont Street in Boston knew how to sharpen pencils.
Another little tip—use the same ruler throughout the project. As I write, there’s a clean steel ruler on my desk that shows inches with fractions on one edge and millimeters grouped by tens (centimeters) on the other. It’s an English ruler exactly eighteen inches long, and the millimeter side is fudged to make them fit. The last millimeter is 457, and the first millimeter is obviously too big. If I were working in millimeters and alternating between this ruler and another, I’d be getting two versions of my measurements. While the quarter-millimeter might not matter a lot of the time, it will matter a lot sometimes. I have several favorite rulers at my workbench. One is 150mm long (it’s usually in my shirt pocket next to the sharp pencil), another is 500, and another is 1000. I use them for everything and interchange them with impunity because I know I can trust them. With all the advances in the technology of tools I’ve witnessed and enjoyed during my career, I’ve never seen a saw that will cut a piece of wood a little longer. The guy who comes up with that will quickly be wealthy (along with the guy who invents a magnet that will pick up a brass screw!).
My wife Wendy is a literary agent, with a long list of clients who have fascinating specialties. In dinner-table conversations we’ve gone through prize-winning poets, crime on Mt. Everest, multiple personalities, the migration of puffins, flea markets, and teenagers’ brains (!). Her client Walter Lewin is a retired professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is famous for his rollicking lectures in the course Physics 8.01, the most famous introductory physics course in the world. On the first page of the introduction to his newly published book, For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time—A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics, Lewin addresses his class: “Now, all important in making measurements, which is always ignored in every college physics book”—he throws his arms wide, fingers spread—“is the uncertainty of measurements . . . Any measurement that you make without knowledge of the uncertainty is meaningless.” I’m impressed that Professor Lewin thinks that inaccuracy is such an important part of the study of physics that it’s just about the first thing mentioned in his book.
The thickness of my pencil lines, my choice of the ruler, and the knowledge about where in the line the saw blade should go are uncertainties of my measuring. If I know the uncertainties, I can limit my margin of error. I do this every time I make a mark on a piece of wood. And by the way, if you’re interested at all in questions like “why is the sky blue,” you’ll love Lewin’s book. And for an added bonus you can find these lectures on YouTube—type his name into the search box and you’ll find a whole library. Lewin is a real showman—part scientist, part eccentric, all great communicator—and his lectures are at once brilliantly informative and riotously humorous.
Now about that panel that will fit into the dados cut in the frame members. Given the outside dimensions and the width of the four frame pieces, the size of the panel will be 850mm x 350mm (if your cutting has been accurate). But don’t forget that you have to make it oversize so it fits into the dado. 7.5mm on each side will do it—that allows for seasonal shrinkage without having the panel fall out of the frame. So to be safe, cut the dados 10mm deep allowing a little space for expansion, and cut the panel to 865mm x 365mm—that’s the space defined by the four-sided frame plus 7.5mm on each side, which is 15mm on each axis. Nothing to it.
Now that you’ve all had this little organbuilding lesson, look at the case of a good-sized organ. There might be 40 or 50 panels. That’s a lot of opportunity for error and enough room for buzzing panels to cover every note of the scale.

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For the last several days I’ve been measuring and recording the scales and dimensions of the pipes of a very large Aeolian-Skinner organ that the Organ Clearing House is preparing to renovate for installation in a new home. I’m standing at a workbench with my most accurate measuring tools while my colleague Joshua Wood roots through the pipe trays to give me C’s and G’s. Josh lays the pipes out for me, I measure the inside and outside diameters, thickness of the metal (which is a derivative of the inside and outside diameters—if outside diameter is 40mm and the metal is 1mm thick, the inside diameter is 38mm. I take both measurements to account for uncertainties.), mouth width, mouth height, toehole diameter, etc. As I finish each pipe, Josh packs them back into the trays. With a rank done, we move the tray and find another one. Now you know why I’m thinking about measurements so much today.
When studying, designing, or making organ pipes, we refer to the mouth-width as a ratio to the circumference, the cut-up as a ratio of the mouth’s height to width, and the scale as a ratio of the pipe’s diameter to its length. If I supply diameter and actual width of the mouth, the voicer can use the Archimedian Constant (commonly known as π - Pi) to determine the mouth-width ratio, and so on, and so forth.
Here’s where I must admit that my knowledge of organ voicing is limited to whatever comes from working generally as an organbuilder, without having any training or experience with voicing. My colleagues who know this art intimately will run circles around my theories, and I welcome their comments. From my inexpert position, I’ll try to give you some insight into why these dimensions are important.
The width of the mouth of an organ pipe means little or nothing if it’s not related to another dimension. Using the width as a ratio to the circumference of a pipe gives us a point of reference. For example, a mouth that’s 40mm wide might be a wide mouth for a two-foot pipe, but it’s a narrow mouth for a four-foot pipe. A two-foot Principal pipe with diameter of 45mm might have a mouth that’s 40mm wide—that’s a mouth-width roughly 2/7 of the circumference, on the wide side for Principal tone. The formula is: diameter (45) times π (3.1416) divided by mouth-width (40). In this case, we get the circumference of 141.372mm. Round it off to 141, divide by 40 (mouth-width), and you get 3.525, which is about 2/7 of 141. Each time I adapt the number to keep things simple, I’m accepting the inaccuracy of my measurements.
The mouths of Flute pipes are usually narrower (in ratio) than those of Principals. Yesterday I measured the pipes of a four-foot Flute, which had a pipe with the same 40mm mouth-width, but the diameter of that pipe was about 55mm. That’s a ratio of a little less than 1/4. The difference between a 2/7 mouth and a 1/4 (2/8) mouth tells the voicer a lot about how the pipe will sound.
And remember, those diameters are a function of the scale, the ratio of the diameter to the length. My two example pipes with the same mouth width are very different in pitch. The Principal pipe (45mm in diameter) speaks middle C of an eight-foot stop, while the Flute with the 40mm mouth speaks A# above middle C of an eight-foot.

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You can imagine that the accuracy of all these measurements is very important to the tone of an organ. The tonal director creates a chart of dimensions for the pipes of an organ, including all these various dimensions for every pipe, plus the theoretical length of each pipe, the desired height of the pipe’s foot, etc. The pipemaker receives the chart and starts cutting metal. Let’s go back to our two-foot Principal pipe. Diameter is 45mm. Speaking length is two feet, which is about 610mm. Let’s say the height of the foot is 200mm. The pipemaker needs three pieces of metal—a rectangle that rolls up to become the resonator, a pie-shaped piece that rolls up into a cone to make the foot, and a circle for the languid.
For the resonator, multiply the diameter by π: 45 x 3.1416 = 141.37mm (this time I’m rounding it to the hundredth)—that’s the circumference of the pipe, so it’s the width of the pipemaker’s rectangle. Cut the rectangle circumference-wide by speaking-length-long: 141.37 x 610.
For the foot, use the same circumference and the height of the foot for the dimensions of the piece of pie: 141.37mm x 200.
Roll up the rectangle to make a tube that’s 45mm in diameter by 610 long, and solder the seam.
Roll up the piece of pie to make a cone that’s 45mm in diameter at the top and 200mm long, and solder the seam.
Cut a circle that’s 45mm in diameter and solder it to the top of the cone, then solder the tube to the whole thing. (I will not discuss how to cut the mouth or form the toehole.)
But Professor Lewin’s adage reminds us that no pipemaker is ever going to be able to cut those pieces of metal exactly 141.37mm wide. That’s the number I got from my calculator after rounding tens-of-thousandths of a millimeter down to hundredths. You have to understand the uncertainty of your measurements to get any work done.

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As I take the measurements of these thousands of organ pipes, I record them on charts we call scale sheets—one sheet for each rank. I reflect on how important it is to the success of the organ that this information be accurate. I’m using a digital caliper—a neat tool with a sliding scale that measures either inside or outside dimensions. The LED readout gives me the dimensions in whatever form I want—I can choose scales that give inches-to-the-thousandth, inches-to-the-sixty-fourth, or millimeters-to-the-hundredth. I’m using the millimeter scale, rounding hundredths of a millimeter up to the nearest tenth. As good as my colleagues are and as accurately as they might work, they’re not going to discern the difference between a mouth that’s 45.63mm wide from one that’s 45.6mm.
And as accurately as I try to take and record these measurements, what I’m measuring is hand made. I might notice that the mouth of a Principal pipe is 16.6mm high on one end and 16.8mm high on the other. A difference of .2mm can’t change the sound of the pipe that much—so I’ll record it as 16.7. I know the uncertainties of my measurements. I adapt each measurement at least twice (rounding to the nearest tenth and adapting for uneven mouth-height) in order to ensure its accuracy. Yikes!

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Earlier I mentioned how people who work with measurements all the time develop a knack for judging them. I’ve been tuning organs for more than 35 years, counting my way up tens of thousands of ranks of pipes, listening to and correcting the pitches, all the time registering the length of the pipes subconsciously. With all that history recorded, if I’m in an organ and my co-worker plays a note, I can reach for the correct pipe by associating the pitch with the length of the pipe.
π (pi) is a magical number—that Archimedes ever stumbled on that number as the key to calculating the dimensions of a circle is one of the great achievements of the human race. How can it be possibly be true that πd is the circumference of a circle while πr2 is the area? Here’s another neat equation. A perfect cone is one whose diameter is equal to its height. The volume of a perfect cone is exactly half that of a sphere with the same diameter. How did we ever figure that one?
There are no craftsmen in any trade who understand π better than the organ-pipemaker. When you visit a pipe shop, you might see a stack of graduated metal rectangles destined to be the resonators of a rank of pipes. The pipemaker knows π as instinctively as I can tell that the first millimeter on my ruler is too big. Imagine looking at a tennis ball and guessing its circumference!

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When you’re buying measuring tools, you must pay attention to accuracy. Choose an accurate ruler by comparing three or four of them against each other and deciding which one is most accurate. Choose an accurate level by comparing three or four of them. You’ll be surprised how often two levels disagree. Just as mathematics gives us the surety of π, so physics gives us the surety of level. There is only one true level!
I’ve been showing off all morning about how great I am with measurements in theory and practice, so I’ll bust it all up with another story about van windshields. I left the shop to drive to the lumberyard to pick up a few long boards of clear yellow pine. They had beautiful rough-cut boards around thirteen feet long, eight and ten inches wide, and two inches thick. Each board was pretty heavy, and as they were only roughly planed, it was easy to get splinters from them. I put the first one in the car, resting the front end on the dashboard right against the windshield. Perfect—the door closed fine, let’s get another. I slid the second one up on the first, right through the windshield. Good eye!