It's difficult to imagine that such beautiful music has its beginnings in the humblest of materials - sheet metal and lumber, the same materials used to build your house - and for much the same purposes:

• The sheet metal ductwork which carries your heated or cooled air is also used in a pipe organ - to deliver a supply of pressurized air to the windchests; a specialized type of sheet metal is used to form the flue pipes, as shown on the previous page.
• The pine joists used to support your floors are used to construct the frames of the windchests, as shown in the photo sereis below.
• The dimensional lumber used to build your kitchen cabinets is used in the pipe organ to create the pipeboards, which support the pipes atop the windchests, as well as some cabinetwork and the swell chests.
• The select lumber - cherry or mahogany, for example - used to face your cabinetwork is used to build the wooden pipes within the organ, the organ's cabinetwork - the organ console, which houses the keyboards and all the controls for the pipes - and sometimes to fashion the organ's keys themselves.
• Electrical wiring, such as that used to control your doorbells, is used to control the elerctropnuematic action of most pipe organs - that is, to control which pipes "speak" when the oragnist presses the keys on any of the manuals or steps upon the levers of the pedalboard.

  Building a windchest
  The frame of a windchest, looking much like the joists of a small shed.	The humble beginnings of a pipeboard - a piece of pine, marked for the drilling of holes to support the pipes. This pipeboard will support round metal, or flue, pipes.

  The pipe board has two parts - the bottom board, through which air enters the toe of the pipe, and the rack - the top board, which supports the foot, or base, of the pipe.

  Once the pipe board is assembled the feet for the pipes which will eventually rest on that particular pipeboard are custom-fitted to ensure a tight fit.

  After final fitting of the pipe feet to the pipeboards, the pipeboards are aseembled to the top of the windchest.

  The windchest, with all the pipeboards attached, is turned over for final assembly. The bottoms of the pipeboards are visible as the "floor" of the windchest in this view (the holes are the points at which air will enter the toes of the pipes). I'll be adding a drawing to show how these components interact to transofrm the pressing of a key into a musical tone.

  I hope you've enjoyed this all-too-brief tour of the M. P. Moller Pipe Organ Company. I will be adding some photos of a general nature - the assembly floor of the Moller factory, other phases of the construction process, and the final steps of the rebuilding of the organ at the United States Naval Academy.

  In the meantime, check out these links for more detailed information on pipe organ construction and on pipe organs in general:

  The Pipe Organ, by Marya J. Fancey
  How Organs Work
  A great site on the technical side of organs
  Who built theatre organs?

  And for those do-it-yourselfers in the audience...

  How to Build a Small Organ

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  Last updated Saturday, April 4, 1998