Today's Friday

This morning was tied up with errand doing. Collecting my pay from the good doctor for the restoration of the waterlogged organ, trip to the bank, on to Cracker Jacks for some black poster board, then Rite-Aid for the newspaper, and finally IGA.

I was expecting a call around noontime from the customer who had borrowed my grand board and mover's straps. He was going to return them around noon, but planned on calling first. No call, no return of goods. Oh well, I do trust that he will get them back to me.

Today, I made great progress on the rebuild of the Moline chapel organ. I love this reed organ and, if the idea weren't to make some money, I'd keep it as my own. I may own it for awhile anyway with the miserable state of the economy and the fact that it will be a tad on the high price tag for some. Most of the case parts are ready - a finish refurbish rather than new finish. I do have a lot of work to do eliminating a handful of grey paint drips on the back lower right. Nice that this is a chapel organ and therefore has a viewable back, lousy that it means it won't necessarily be against a wall and so the back must look as good as the front - no paint drips! Other issues included that someone had switched two of the stop labels, interchanging the 'sub bass' and the 'violin'. I pried the labels out of the knobs and switched them back to their original locations. The mouse screening on the bottom was in tatters and I've eliminated it. The supports had warped and were interfering with the collapse of the reservoir so I tipped the organ on it's back to remove the supports. No problem to lower the organ with gravity in my favor. Another story when I wanted to right it! First, I repeatedly added planking under each side of the back until it was tipped high enough to get a good handhold. Then I found that it was too great a span to comfortably grab each side and still lift the weight. What to do? 'A' was at work, Mom has a bad back - she just got cortisone injections in it yesterday. I thought and thought and finally came up with a solution. I tied a mover's strap around the prostrate organ, towards the top (if upright). I used the strap as a handle, pulling straight up from the middle of the strap, leveraging the organ back to it's upright position.

Worked great!

Now I've got the Vox Humana to sort out. It's linkage has been butchered in the past and doesn't seem to have the correct throw/fulcrum vs. brake/open that is required.

Then the entire organ, case and all, will have to be taken apart in to smaller sections to be moved upstairs. It won't fit up the stairs otherwise! Here are some parts of it when I had disassembled it to take it downstairs for the rebuild.

I feel like I got a lot accomplished today. My body feels like it, too!