Metal Fabrication

"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura) 05/21/2018 at 09:07 • Filed to: None

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The material is tin with some lead mixed in. This instrument is in a man’s living room.

ttyymmnn > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 09:19

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That’s cool. I’m assuming he had the case custom-built to fit that space. And that it was not inexpensive.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 09:28

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I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have that in the house.

Alfalfa > ttyymmnn 05/21/2018 at 09:29

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Hey, you never know. I once knew an old architect who designed his house to fit his pipe organ.

CalzoneGolem > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 09:34

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Those wooden keys are beautiful.

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 09:48

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Believe it or not I’m a professional organ technician. That’s a nice looking case. If built today the whole instrument could easily be in the $50-$100k range.

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/21/2018 at 09:49

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And yes, virtually all organ pipes smaller than 4’ are traditionally various mixtures of tin and lead. And therefore very soft.

Also, AMA!

OPPOsaurus WRX > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 09:55

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there was a house i wanted to look at but my wife said no before we could even get it. it coame with an organ that may have been bigger than that

LOREM IPSUM > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 10:00

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The neighbors must love him. Hope he knows Iron Butterfly, at least.

ttyymmnn > CalzoneGolem 05/21/2018 at 10:26

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Wood keys were common on organs and harpsichords of the Baroque era. I’m not sure when ivory keys starting coming into vogue, but it was not uncommon to see “reversed” keyboards, where the upper sharp and flat keys were white while the big keys were ebony or some other dark wood, as this used significantly less ivory. Ivory stopped being used in the 1970s, and most keys are now plastic or resin, though some legal ivory is still available.

ttyymmnn > CalzoneGolem 05/21/2018 at 10:26

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Wood keys were common on organs and harpsichords of the Baroque era. I’m not sure when ivory keys starting coming into vogue, but it was not uncommon to see “reversed” keyboards, where the upper sharp and flat keys were white while the big keys were ebony or some other dark wood, as this used significantly less ivory. Ivory stopped being used in the 1970s, and most keys are now plastic or resin, though some legal ivory is still available.

CalzoneGolem > ttyymmnn 05/21/2018 at 10:27

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This picture is rocking my worldview.

Alfalfa > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap 05/21/2018 at 11:51

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Could you tell my wife that?

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Alfalfa 05/21/2018 at 11:55

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Yes hi Alfalfa’s wife I’m a guy from the internet who you’ve never met but I believe that an organ is a perfectly reasonable instrument to have in a house.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > ttyymmnn 05/21/2018 at 13:27

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Other way ‘round. That instrument was constructed to serve as a substitute instrument somewhere while the company, Miller, was building a new organ. It changed hands and then this guy bought it. He had that room added on in part to accommodate the practice organ.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Alfalfa 05/21/2018 at 13:28

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In this case, the organist had his extra room built to accommodate the instrument...

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap 05/21/2018 at 13:28

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PS: The internet is always right.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap 05/21/2018 at 13:29

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Particularly if you know how to play it.

ttyymmnn > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 13:29

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Well, there you go. He shoulda bought a harpsichord instead.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > CalzoneGolem 05/21/2018 at 13:30

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The whole thing is beautiful. I like the metalwork the best.

Alfalfa > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/21/2018 at 13:37

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What’s the biggest pipe organ you’ve ever seen in someone’s house?

Alfalfa > ttyymmnn 05/21/2018 at 13:38

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I want an organ so I can play Fats Waller all day. A harpsichord will not do for that purpose.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 13:50

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I dont. I wasnt much good with one keyboard let alone 3.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/21/2018 at 14:12

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We need to get you your juice so that you can comment here in the black and not be waiting for someone to approve you. Let me see if I can get that to happen for you.

And I have a question:

If you took the longest unstopped 8' pipe from every rank and laid all of them side by side on the ground, how much would they vary in actual length?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > OPPOsaurus WRX 05/21/2018 at 14:18

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There’s a joke to be made here about your own organ, but I’m not going to go there and I can’t believe nobody else has in this thread.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > LOREM IPSUM 05/21/2018 at 14:18

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Some Bach Fugues, no doubt, but probably not Iron Butterfly.

LOREM IPSUM > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/21/2018 at 14:23

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Pretty awesome nonetheless!

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap 05/21/2018 at 14:26

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Or five:

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/22/2018 at 00:08

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Some, but overall not a great deal, I’d guess much less than 10%. Many factors do effect the actual length of a tuned 8’ C pipe — scale (diameter), mouth height, wind pressure, ambient temperature.

Even on a pipe that large the difference between In time and grossly out of tune is less than an inch.

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Alfalfa 05/22/2018 at 00:12

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I’ve been to see this one and I used to know the head curator. My parents had one about like the one pictured above, though much simpler construction.

http://www.sanfilippofoundation.org/music-room.html

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/22/2018 at 18:57

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So the longest pipe in every 8' unstopped rank is literally 8 feet long, within half a foot or less?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/22/2018 at 19:01

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So you don’t pend any more? Your comments go straight in?

KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/22/2018 at 21:16

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Yes. Hence the whole idea of an 8 foot stop. Open flutes will be 8 foot long, and so would any Gedeckt/Bourdon/Stopped Diapasons.

A 16 foot pedal division stop would have a sub contra C pipe that’s about 16 feet long.

32 foot? Yeah, they get big, but most modern constructions of hybrid organs will do digital stops on 32 foot and some 16 foot stops. Depends on what you can convince someone to pay for.

Source: Am an organist.

KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs > ttyymmnn 05/22/2018 at 21:17

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My 70s Baldwin has plastic keys. Two on which are broken on the swell manual. They are playable, but they aren’t attached to anything substantial.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs 05/22/2018 at 21:26

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My dad is an organist and I grew up turning pages and holding the keys at the console while the organist scrambled around in the gallery tuning the notes. The practice organ in my photos belongs to a longtime friend of his and they perform dually in harpsichord concerts together.

So the pipes are scaled to wind up very close to 8 feet in length (the longest one)... Right? I was curious how literal that 8' dimension was or to what extent is was an abstraction.

Wouldn’t a stopped diapason be half as long to get the same concert pitch as an unstopped pipe?

KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/22/2018 at 21:33

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And when a Cornet gets pulled, all those lovely overtones (because I need excuses to throw the mutation stops into the registration).

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/22/2018 at 21:38

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I’m not sure the exact measurement as I’m not a pipe maker, but it is amazingly close to the truth. This leads to a lot of convenient base-2 math; a 16’ stop speaks an octave lower, a 32’ stop 2 octaves lower; 4’ 2’ etc in octaves higher.

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/22/2018 at 21:41

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Yes a stopped pipe speaking the pitch of 8’ C is roughly 4’ long. It’s amazing how close to the truth that 8’ number is considering there’s really no mathematical reason it should work out that way.

KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/22/2018 at 21:57

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The foot pitch is roughly what the length of the lowest C on the manual is (Sub-contra C). It’s fairly literal for an open flue stop.

The rough physics behind it are that the wavelength of the sound produced is about twice the length of a diapason pipe. So if you have an 8 foot pipe, that’s a 16 foot wavelength, which is about a 64Hz wave. (Speed of sound / frequency = wavelength) Which is a sub-contra C at concert pitch.

Depending on the design of a stopped pipe (this gets into cross section and such), you can cut those in half lengthwise and still sound at concert pitch. It does affect the harmonics produced though.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/22/2018 at 22:57

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The physics of it all I assume to be very well understood. I ought to do some reading about it.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs 05/22/2018 at 22:59

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Do you know of a good reference on this subject?

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/22/2018 at 23:31

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I don’t know if there’s something newer, both of these are quite old and should be taken with a generous grain of salt, but:

https://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-American-Organ-William-Barnes/dp/0769242901

Barnes had a hand in a few of the organs I service regularly actually.

https://www.amazon.com/001-Comprehensive-Theoretical-Construction-Concert-Room/dp/0486213145

You could probably get both of these in a well stocked university library or ILL.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > MiniGTI - now with XJ6 05/23/2018 at 05:14

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I’ll have a look; thank you. I’d just like to understand the physics a little better.

KusabiSensei - Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/23/2018 at 08:18

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Even though it is from the early part of the 20th Century, Skinner’s “The Modern Organ” is a good place to start.

Written by one of the best known builders of American Symphonic organs ever, Ernest M. Skinner.

I had the opportunity to hear the Skinner organ at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Chicago, which is one of the few instruments that were not extensively modified during restoration.