wesprayanything.com

The front display pipes on our old organ are being re-used in the new one. Although they are real organ pipes, they are not connected to the wind and make no sound. They were in a terrible state, with at least 3 thick layers of paint (originally “gold” – then 2 layers of aluminium, all painted by brush, with obvious brush strokes and without the pipes being taken out). After some debate, the only solution was to take out all 27 pipes (some of which are over 10 foot long), strip the paint off by hand, clean them with wire wool and white spirit, and then have them refurbished and painted. Emily and I started taking the pipes out in August last year and I brought them home (some stored in my garage, and some in my mother’s garage!).

Bit by bit I cleaned each pipe (gallons of Nitromors!) and polished it up (that takes over 2 hours per pipe). After various trials, it was obvious that they would be best sprayed silver, with the mouths properly gilded with gold leaf (the traditional way of decorating display pipes). My spraying skills are negligible and I don’t have a spray booth, so I had to get someone to do it. I thought about getting a car bodyshop involved, and then came the Budget! On budget night the BBC local news featured a small paint spraying business in Bromsgrove (“wesprayanything.com”) and looked at how it would be affected by the Chancellor’s latest efforts. We might have found our solution – so I took a couple of pipes down to Bromsgrove. Organ pipes were something new to Paul and his team, but they were not daunted and after an hour or so, we had agreed on a colour and finish. Paul agreed to do a trial pipe and emailed photos of it to me. The colour was perfect, so we decided to try a matt polyurethane finish, but when I went down to see it, it was too dull. We then tried a sheen finish and I was happy – so during July, the pipes were taken down to Bromsgrove in batches of 9 and sprayed before coming back to my house in August for gilding.