The software has now been ‘signed off’ as being in full working order by our software engineer and all the electric connections now work perfectly.  In addition last week the final adjustments were made to the wind trunking, and the bottom octave of the Great Open Diapason 8′ was fitted and connected. The small soundboard for the Great Tierce pipes is being made in the workshop and will be fitted this week together with the Great stop motors. By the end of the week all the Phase 1 ‘working parts’ will have been fitted and tested and the console should be finished off and work can begin on fitting the lower casework.

At home, I have now finished removing at least three layers of old paint off two of the three sets of display pipes and washed them. They are now stacked up in my porch ready for the first set of nine to be taken for painting. The plan is that they will be sprayed in a bright pipe-metal colour by a specialist paint shop in Bromsgrove and by the time they are completed, I will have the final set ready for delivery to them.

When each set returns, I will gild the pipe-mouths, and once all twenty-seven pipes are all done, they will be ready for installation in the completed organ case – which will be the final part of the Phase 1 project.

The completed upper case

The bottom pipes of the Great Open Diapason now in place

A porch full of pipes!

We have sound!

Paul, our electrician, finished wiring all the new circuitry this week and Mike and his team began fitting the bottom pipes of the Great 8′ Open Diapason onto the casework, where they will provide facing pipes on the right and left hand sides. I haven’t seen these pipes before and was amazed at their size – the longest is about 11′ high, which was no surprise, but also about about 9″ in diameter which is large for an open diapason – however, I’m told that they sound terrific!

The console was wired into the circuits and on Thursday night we had the great “switch on”. When the console switch was pressed, both of the blowers and all the internal circuitry came on first time.  We then had a little play on the organ using some of the Swell stops.  Even though the have not been properly voiced or tuned yet, they sounded pretty good.

The organ bench from Whyke has now returned to Coventry, cleaned up and refurbished. The height adjustment mechanism had seized up whilst it was in store in Chichester before it was given to us, but this now works perfectly. This is all a bit of a luxury for me – I have never had an adjustable bench before. In the past at All Souls we used some wooden blocks!

The gilded cross and panelling for the casework has now been fitted in place. This weekend I will be looking at the rest of the fretwork that will need to be made, gilded and fitted, and returning to the tedious task of stripping several thick layers of old paint from the front display pipes.

Next week, John, our software designer, will be on site to carry out the final tweakings of the stop control software, the rest of the Open Diapason bottom octave will be fitted into the side panels of the case and the blowers will be soundproofed.

Gilded panel in place

Main casework in place

Scrollwork has been gilded, lettering is ready for size to be applied

My wife thought I was going to mow the lawn! Instead I have been gilding the panels of lettering that will go on the front of the organ case. This was originally painted gold when the original organ was built in 1938, but the paint was poor quality and got so tarnished that the lettering was invisible from below. Now that the woodwork has been cleaned and polished up, I am applying 23.5 carat gold leaf to the lettering and scrollwork. This will never tarnish and should last for about 30 years before it will need to be re-done. The gold leaf is rolled to a sheet that is thinner than tissue paper and comes in little booklets. Each figure to be gilded is fine-sanded, painted and shellacked, and then fine-sanded again until it is absolutely smooth. Gilding size is then brushed on and then, several hours later, when the size is touch dry, the gold leave is cut into small pieces of the right shape, using a gilder’s knife and a suede leather cover gilder’s cushion with a draught screen, which prevents the delicate gold leaf from being destroyed by being blown about. The leaf is then stuck to the size and the edges (or ‘skewings’) are brushed away (and saved for patching!) with a sable-haired mop brush. The gold is then burnished with soft cotton wool. It can be lacquered with shellack after that, but this is not necessary for indoors and dulls the gold leaf a bit, so I’m not doing it.

It’s very fiddly work, requiring lots of concentration and a steady hand.  Annette says that readers should be very grateful that she did not record any sound!

Cutting the leaf

Brushing off the skewings with the mop brush

Sad man at work

Brushing out the leaf

The console (from which the player controls the organ), which was given to us by St George’s Anglican Parish, Whyke, Chichester just over a year ago has now arrived back with us after rebuilding and refurbishing. IT now has 3 manuals (keyboards) and all the stop-knobs for our final specification. Mike and Simon are just finishing off the console wiring before it is connected up to the organ. We now get a much better sense of what the whole job will look like when it is finished.

The rest of the trombone pipes

Now that the blowers have been positioned, it has been possible to fit the rest of the pedal 16′ trombone, which is outside the main case in a section which will eventually contain the Choir division and will be concealed from view.

I will be continuing over the weekend with gilding the sections of the organ case that we now know were originally painted gold and stripping paint from the display pipes before they are finally spray-painted and the mouths gilded.

The Swell and Choir stops

Our church wiring is, in many parts, pretty ancient, but the cabling is very sound, however it is a single phase circuit. We will have two blowers providing wind to the organ. One is single phase, so connects ok, but the other is triple phase (no-one makes suitable single phase blowers any more) and has to have an inverter connected to it to convert the current.  The big problem was how to wire everything so that both blowers and all the other electric components on the organ start with a single switch and also avoid having to rewire the whole of the West gallery. Paul, our electrician (who has become an expert at sorting out circuit problems in old churches since he started working at All Souls!) has now cracked it. Thursday was a long day for him and his team, but all the mains wiring is now in place, the blowers are safely wired in, and there are plenty of plug sockets now ready for the console lighting and switching and, eventually, the CCTV system to be plugged in. Now we can get back to organ building!

Swell soundboard from above. The smallish capped pipes are from the 16′ Bassoon and the larger ones in front are from the 8′ Cornopean – which makes a bright trumpet-type sound

The final wind trunking was installed just before Easter. During Easter week the stop knobs will be glued in place and the keyboards refurbished ready to be fitted into the console. I will continue stripping layers of old paint from the display pipes and hope to start gilding the lettering on the front of the case.  The parish electrician is due next week to install the new circuitry for the console, blowers and the control systems before the final stage in the reconstruction begins

There’s not much to see this week, but a lot of internal work is being done – such as all of the internal wiring and electric connections (there must be several miles of wiring inside the organ), the circuit testing, the wind trunking (which takes the wind from the two blowers to the two reservoir bellows, and then out to all the windchests), and the fitting of the rest of the Swell, Great and Pedal reed pipes.

Today the last of the swell shutters and the three access panels were delivered to church following their repair, cleaning and repainting at home, and there is a bit of late night work going on at the workshop in Burton on Trent to make some new wind trunking to take wind to the rear windchest.

My story (which I’m sticking to) is that it was too cold in the garage for the paint to harden off!

Today, Sunday, after Mass, I finished the last bit of painting on the Swellbox louvred doors and the Swell access panels.  Four of the swell doors from All Souls had split, so I have glued and screwed them together before applying the final paint.  Because these items undergo a lot of movement, they have been painted with exterior gloss paint – which is very hardwearing (it has to be – we have no plans to remove them for at least 25 years!).  This means that the dining table at home is no longer the resting place for drying paintwork!

I have also tried out a few more paint experiments on the display pipes – and I think we may be getting there! As we are having gold colouring on the tops of the organ case, I thought that it would be good if we could have the pipe mouth flats coloured gold to match.  I am quite pleased with the result.  The next moved, once the gold has hardened off is to paint the rest of each pipe and see how it all looks.  It’s a bit slow, as it takes about 18 hours for the gold to harden off before it can take masking tape and I can then spray the final metal paint coat.

So far, so good

When the casework was taken down we found a Cross lying under the Swellbox.  We now know that it was originally fitted to the middle of the top of the case, and when it was cleaned up we discovered that it had originally been coloured gold. We then looked at some of the decorative text and it became clear that some of the script has also been coloured gold. The colouring will be restored and the Cross returned to its original position on the case.

When I began removing the layers of old paint from the front display pipes I found that the pipes had originally been painted gold with some fairly poor quality paint. Today we cleaned up the display pipes and tested out the proposed silver/aluminium paint – but it didn’t really look too good, so I will have another look at that over the weekend.

The new bass pipes for the Swell 16′ Bassoon have been fitted into the Swellbox today and a lot of the intricate wiring for the control systems was done.  With around 2,000 tiny low voltage wires to strip and connect it was a fairly slow job, requiring a lot of care from Mike Thompson, but we got there with a couple of minutes to spare before Friday Evening Prayer started!

Work started today on rebuilding the casework and we spent further time on designing the changes to the console, which will be built into the front of the organ case. Further work will be done in the workshop tomorrow, and then the console framework will be brought to church on Friday for installation.  The front display pipes are also being worked on and we will be trying some paint tests on Friday. In addition to all of this, lots of wiring is being done, prior to the power being connected up, probably next week.

The casework has had layers of old wax and varnish removed using methylated spirits and lots of rubbing down.  They have now been polished up with button polish and, once they have been installed, they will be waxed for a fine finish. There’s still a long way to go, but we are definitely at the beginning of the end!