Restoring the Casavant Pipe organ -- Part 5 -- Conclusion / Retrospective

The project actually completed a few years ago so this post will tie up the loose ends and give a status of how the project went down and what future directions I am going to be taking in this interest in my life.

So as of the last post, I had been working with one of the original players in the solid state console industry to take over the business and bring some of my innovations to what he had offered.  Creative differences got in the way of that moving forward.   It was further decided not to roll my own controller as I had planned, but instead to purchase on "off-the-shelf" system for controlling the Organ.   It was less risky because the system was well proven in very large installations.   That system was the Opus-2 Organ relay system.

Here my mentor/advisor can be seen wiring up one of the two boards that held the printed circuit boards that made up the system.  One of these was to be located in the cabinet containing the pipes and winding, the other inside the console where the keyboards were located.  Richard passed away from brain cancer about the same time of the conclusion of my participation of the project.

What happened though in the bigger scale about the time these boards were being produced is that I ended moving back to Indiana to facilitate an adoption I was doing.   In so doing, I had to do a lot of wrap-up work while in Michigan because my new home was six hours drive one way.

One of the most important things that had to first happen was console renovations.   As I stated in previous installments, the plastic that was used with the keys and stop tabs were "off-gassing" which resulted in the material literally crumbling and otherwise decaying.     Here we see the original stop controls as they were.

The original state of the console also had no "combination action" which allows for quick changing of the stop controls.  These are little buttons under the keyboards that can be set to "remember" combinations of stops, hence the name.   So I personally bought and donated a replacement rail from the Petersen company and had it installed with the help of David Wigton of  Wigton Pipe Organs.  The finished one is here.

The specification also was changed to be reflective not as a "unit" organ but of a small organ with couplers, so that eventually, new stops could be added.   In a Unit organ there is a lot of borrowing of pitches from the same ranks of pipes.  When this is done, couplers are redundant.  So in this update we got rid of much of the borrowing and treated the stops more as a "straight" (not borrowed as much) organ would have been.   There is still some borrowing, but the eventual goal would have been to fill in some of the borrows with independent ranks of pipes.    

Not however that even these keyboards were also starting to fall apart.   Now the original keyboards were designed for when the switching was done in the old way.   So for each key there would be a contact for each of the stops in that division.  For instance, if you press middle "C", eight contact for that key would engage and if the corresponding stop of each of those contacts were also engaged, the circuit would complete and the note would play.

Now since this was a digital system, only one contact would be needed.  On careful consideration giving what was necessary (rebuild of the keyboards, etc) I opted to fully replace these manuals from another instrument that had certain advantages.   One these were already rebuild and contained the keyboard contacts that were needed for the digital system.   Further they had custom rosewood sharps that added something to the original.    In all an upgrade.  Not shown here are the pistons that were added later to give each division eight combinations and another eight for the Generals.

Also as part of the console upgrade, the old rectifier that was in the pipe area was replaced with a modern switching power supply that would have more capacity to handle the new demands brought on by the stop control mechanism (at any one point ALL of those stops could move, each has a 20-40 ohm coil that activates this).  In addition there is the resting current draw as well from all of the chips making up the system.   In the older version, if nothing was touched, there would be no current draw.  This was located to the console closer to where most of current would be used.   A set of cables brought the necessary power to the pipe area.

From October 2021, until I left my part of the project a year later, my work was mostly remote in wiring up the keyboard contacts to the computer portion in the console as well as the stop magnets and getting the whole thing programmed.   A further setback happened when the CEO of the Opus Two company had a personal tragedy that caused their involvement to be curtained.   

While this was going on my son and I were making weekend trips to finish the pipe chamber part of the installation.    There was the work previous where the cotton covered wire was updated but now the offset and pedals chests needed the same work, which was done in-situ.   

The panel in the console was slow going in that every single wire (there was over 340 of them) to to be "rung out" and mated to the appropriate connector on the driver boards.  I think I was averaging 5-6 hours per rank!   There were five ranks.  Between this and the other work in the console, I bet we made 5-6 trips.

At the end of 2022, We had accomplished most all of the work when parish leadership decided we were moving too slow and they decided to bring in another man to finish the job.   Mind you that this organ was not used hardly at all because the parish transitioned to piano music.  However during Covid the organ became a necessary evil (in the pianists mind) and the parish rediscovered their past.   Once the covid restrictions were over however, they went back to the Piano, which was in the front of the church rather than the rear gallery.

The new guy and I communicated and did a hand-over and I communicated what needed to be yet done (by this time were were well over 90% complete).   He was very cooperative, but what happened after was more on parish leadership than himself.  In the end the organ was again working.  

Reflections on my time abroad.

 Back in 2001, at the close of the .com bubble burst, I started a new life for myself by moving to Germany. I had been granted a significant amount of founder stock at the company I had been at and, while it wasn't the projected amount of value before the burst, it was still pretty reasonable after paying the option price.

Germany had aways been my place of vacation, starting in the early 1990's. When I was in college a friend in the next dorm room challenged me to get more in touch with my roots, so I did but first taking classes in German both at the college and at the Goethe Institute in Chicago. However in all of my visits, none of this really helped me communicate.

So as the visits accumulated through the 1990's more people "suggested" that I move there and learn the language and discover the country. This became more serious when Chancellor Schroeder created a Green Card for IT people. So following the bust, I figured I would embark on a new adventure.

Before leaving however, I had dinner with an old German couple who had immigrated via Canada in the early 1950's. He was a Pipe Organ builder by trade. They warned me that after staying there a period of time that I should not come back. They related their story of going back to Germany in the 1960's and finding it totally foreign to them and ended up coming back to the USA. They only visited after that. I took it on advisement.

So some of the changes that I experienced was more of a communal atmosphere where people collaborated on things. The negative side of this was that meetings that should have taken 20-30 minutes now took hours because they would discuss it to death!

I found the experience very rewarding and met a lot of new friends though being in outside of work events. However in most of the places I worked at we would organize a movie night at my place. It was a nice way to blow off steam.

Eventually I started my own company after being laid off a second time in as much a three years due to companies change of requirements. It was suggested to me by the labor agency to start my own company and work as a freelancer. This was also a new program, targeting the high unemployment numbers of the time (~2004). Generally it was successful for most people doing it and very successful for the labor agency as they don't track freelancers on the unemployment.

However after eight years of doing this (and fourteen years abroad) I decided to return home. I remembered what those people had told me and I have to admit there was some culture shock items when I did come home.

However the biggest one kind of snuck up on me. Back in the 1990's when I worked for Hyatt and Walgreens (and even the company that went on the stock market for that matter) we had a loose culture of collaboration. So people would take breaks together and discuss the item at hand and even sometimes sports. It was at this last company that I was told very directly after I turned away a more junior engineer when I was focused on a project, that my first focus is on my co-workers because we succeed as a team! This would later be refined in Germany as they don't really like the idea of "diva's" but rather an all more or less equal team. This seems to have disappeared nearly altogether in the modern workforce. I am not sure what to attribute this to, whether it be the younger workforce that grew up on social media leading to real relationship challenges, a more focused (lean) business strategy or what. I have only recently looked back to notice the pattern. I still know and am in contact with my earliest co-workers both from before I left for Germany (2001) and during my time there (until 2015). However which two exceptions, I am not in contact with any other co-worker from any other company since. I know a lot has changed in my time away. It's hard to get into any discussion without politics somehow creeping in. What used to be Godwin's law requiring about 40 or so back-and-forth's before the inevitability of Hitler being brought up, now takes substantially less. Now I think they are going to have to make a new one for what comes up today in discussion. The other thing is just how caustic communications have become. I think this mainly has to do with the rise of electronic communications and the decrease in direct discussions, face to face. Is this all for the better? I wonder.

Restoring the Casavant Pipe organ -- Part 4 -- A new brain for the Organ

Pipe organs built before the 1970's that were of the non-mechanical (Tracker) types included a switching mechanism that controlled which stops would play when the stop controls would be activated.  Before we go into the specifics we need to make a distinction between "Rank" and "Stop."   A Rank is a physical set of organ pipes that make up a particular voice.  A stop is a control that brings a Rank into play.   However there can also be a many to one relationship here.   With the use of a relay a rank can appear as multiple stops as shown below:

Here we have a physical set of 97 pipes that play at 16, 8, 4 and 2 foot pitches.   This could be four stops on a single keyboard or as in the case with a lot of instruments, four on the upper, four on the lower and two on the pedal -- out of a single rank of pipes.   So it is deceiving to speak of "stops" when speaking about the size of an instrument.  This Casavant has five ranks, but twenty-five stops.    The technique described above is called "Unification."  A Relay is needed to make this happen.

This relay  also is responsible for implementing "couplers" (which are used to join keyboards and allow keyboards to also play at super and sub octaves).    This can allow the keyboards to be joined together so that entirety of the instrument can appear on one keyboard for increased volume.  It's generally not a good idea to combine couplers and unification on a single instrument, because it is redundant.   The Casavant has only two couplers.  One to join the upper keyboard to the lower and one to join the lower keyboard to the pedals.

The issue with these older relays is that they use contacts and leather pouches with over time get worn out and fail to function properly or at all.   The picture below is an example of part of a relay showing the pouch and contacts.   When one of this gets worn out, the leather develops holes, preventing the pouch from inflating and allowing it to function and/or contacts can get pitted which prevents the electrical function to work:

With the new system, everything happens inside a computer and there are just control chips that make the relay function.

At the time of this writing (December 13) the design is complete and parts are starting to arrive as seen in the picture below:

The two larger objects in the top  left are control computers.  One will go in the console (where the keyboards exist) and one will go into the pipe enclosure.  They will connect either through a physical network connector or Wi-Fi.   The other packages (the bags) contain the chips that will read the keyboards and play the pipes.   

A while back I performed a study to measure latency  of using a Wi-Fi connection and the data bears it out as a possibility.   This would also allow multiple consoles to control the pipes.

At present work is occurring to create the circuit boards and writing the control programs that run on the console and pipe enclosure computers.

Restoring the Casavant Pipe Organ -- Part 3 -- First batch of the pouch boards installed

The first batch of re-wired pouch boards have been installed inside the organ.  

 

As you can see with this reinstallation, the inside of the wind chest is a lot cleaner.  The biggest change was the inclusion of the ground wire inside of the cable bundle.  The new cable will be attached to the side of the chest and routed to the front of the chest and brought out the front, as was the case in the previous installation.