Thursday and Monday at the OB

Hello everyone,

Last Thursday was another productive day at the OB.

Jack and I tracked down the problem with the four Bourdon notes that has stopped playing. Seems we disconnected the ground wire over the on stage regulators when we were installing the big windlines. Jack re-connected it and now the Tuba offset also works. In the process we found that the wires from the driver card to the chests had the G and Gx pipes interchanged and this was also fixed.

Gerry continued with the windlines in the main chamber. He put the short pipe from the distribution box up to the clarinet chest back in place, after shortening it by about a quarter inch. He then connected the line from this box to the tremulant just inside the dividing wall between the chambers, a bit of magic here in trying to get the pipe around some wall studs, but it is finished. He also has the final windline about ready to complete from the eight foot diapason down to the line coming thru the floor from the basement, this line had to be moved to make space for the style D pipes.

Jack wrapped the 19 lowest pipe resonators with glued on paper, this prevents the resonators from getting stuck in the ferrules soldered to the reed blocks. If they get stuck we sometimes break off the ferrule from the boot trying to remove them. Next time he will do the same with the french horn and the Morton trumpet offset.

The Tibia seems to be free of dirt now, when I started the organ on Monday for the DVD showing there was wonderful, even unexpected silence from the pipes, not a single cypher nor keyboard fault. This has never happened before, an indication that we may finally be getting the organ into playable shape. We still have a few keys and the bottom F pedal that are out of adjustment. The pedal board really needs to be brought to Ottawa and the adjusting screws replaced with bolts with Nylock nuts, and properly painted and striped with the gold.

We had planned to tune the organ in the afternoon, but Murray had a tech (Gordon McLeod) from the sound system people in calibrating the audio system, made a lot of white noise, and we never had the time to tune. This was unfortunate because the organ was a bit sick sounding on Monday. We absolutely must get it into tune quickly, and keep it that way as it reflects badly on our abilities to present the DVD to the public.

Speaking of which, Bill B asked Keith Peever to play for the audience before the DVD presentation, and aside from the organ sounding poorly, Keith is a church organ plodder and IMHO should first learn how to play in TO style before appearing at the OB.This is NOT what we want as a demo of the TO.

The presenation went fine, we had a false start with the organ encoding, quickly corrected and on the second try it was fine. We had about 120 people, 100 from the Mary Cook tour and some others invited by Bill and from the Pembrooke symphony. We may do a spring concert with the orchestra at the theatre. Also Mary Cook has another 300 people on a list that want to do this tour. And the town enriched us by $150, half of which we will give to Murray.

So, this thursday, want to see the windlines finished, the ferrules papered, I want to put the reeds into the boots of the bottom 19 Stlye D and put the resonators back in place. Jack put the bottom boards back on, the wiring is completed back to the driver board, it is winded, we are a few hours shy of being able to play these pipes. Dave, can we work out some way to play these from the console, perhaps as a switch for the Morton Trumpet? We have enough driver cards but we need an replacement for the Emutek controller card.

See you on Thursday.

Salut

Ross