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.
