Why did I purchase lots of woodscrews?    This is why.

It’s a little hard to see in the image, but each of the piston holes is now flanked by a pair of screws.  These will be used as terminal posts to connect the pistons to the MIDI encoder.  For each piston, one screw will be attached to GND, and the other will go to the encoder board.  When a piston is depressed, it is told to brighten up, pull itsself together, and act smart it pulls the signal to ground, which is converted into a MIDI message and sent to the computer for processing.

Hole-drilling took little time (once I had determined that 2mm was the correct bit size, after cautious efforts with bits ranging from 1.2mm upwards).  Inserting 88 screws became boring very quickly.

I visited Mr Norwich Organs last week, and came away with more wire than one person should comfortably possess, along with the usual sound advice borne from decades of experience.  The plan this week is to solder tails to the pistons and insert them into the rails, then begin the process of wiring them up.  Which means I will shortly have to start thinking about the placement of the MIDI boards.

What with one thing and another, it is unlikely that I shall get any sound out of the organ this side of Christmas, which is a shame, but with any luck it will be speaking its first notes in January.