The helping hands turned out to be no help whatsoever.  Never mind.  The swell manual is finished (apart from the ribbon cable, of which more later), the contacts tested, and the pistons secured.  The soldering is bloody awful isn’t the best, but it does the job: all the pistons pull to GND when depressed.  I’ve learned several lessons during my painful attempts at soldering this manual, which I will apply to future efforts.  The two most important being: Solder isn’t expensive, so don’t scrimp; and, flux is your friend.  But first, more coffee.

Pictures are during and after.  Don’t look to closely at the soldering; I gave serious consideration to blurring it out, until I remembered that I was taking the pictures with a potato anyway.

So much for a January noise-production.

Cheap, nickel-plated screws, even heavily abraded with the dremel, do not good solder posts make.  Nothing I have done has been able to convince the solder to stay attached to the screw.  Vexing.

So I have just received a pack of rather more expensive brass screws of the same pitch and length, and this weekend I shall replace all ninety-six of the old new screws (which shall be flung into the outer darkness or, at least, the recycling bin) with new new ones.  And then try soldering again.  If this doesn’t work, I shall scream and swear, and generally throw a tantrum.

I can’t get the solder to stick to the terminal screws, which is something of a vexation.  I’m fairly sure the iron is heating the screws sufficiently, since they make the wood smoke.  I have ordered some liquid flux, which I hope will help.  In the meantime, all 43 pistons have now been inserted into the correct holes and screwed down.  Beautiful, isn’t it?

Here they all are, tailed-up and continuity-tested…

Now begins the task of inserting and securing them into the holes to which they have been allocated…

And here is the front face of the swell manual.  A small screw is used to hold each piston in place.  Note the ‘SOLO’ button in green on the left, next to an LED.  This will be configured so that a solo division can be swapped onto the manual, whenever the button is pressed.  If I am clever enough, I will make it so that selecting the solo division on any manual will restore any other manual with solo selected to its original division.  Pressing the piston a second time will also do this.  That’s the theory, anyway.

The regretful fly in my ointment of productivity is that I purchased the wrong size of small screws – M2 instead of M4.  Oh well, off to the screw shop again.

Been soldering the piston tails, and got myself a nasty burn on my finger.  This is entirely my fault, because I’ve been soldering with a needle tip instead of a blade tip.  Soldering is now delayed until the blade tip arrives in the post (Friday, with any luck).

Meanwhile, beer and paracetomol.

I forgot.  The piston each have fine ribs along the barrels, to keep them in place when inserted.  This is no good to me, because i) the holes have been drilled to be extremely tight, and ii) several of the pistons have writing on them, and need to be lined up exactly.  Rather than ribs, the pistons will be kept in place by a small screw driven into the barrel from above.  So I have spent the last couple of hours carefully shaving off the ribs of each piston.  My thumbs hurt.

Soldering next.

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.

So, today I have received the MIDI bits, an earth busbar, micro drill bits, and collets for the dremel.  This weeked, I will hopefully be screwing the piston terminals into the back of the piston rail, and wiring up the keyboard stack.

Just don’t ask me about the farce that is FedEx.  Sheesh.

I’m still waiting for the pistons to come back from the engravers (next week some time), so I thought I’d spend some money on the MIDI hardware I need to connect up the manuals and pistons.  Bought some screws, too.  Now I have to live in the dark and eat potato peelings for the rest of the month.

I’m away for the whole of the first week in December, including the weekends, but my baby could potentially speak its first notes before Christmas.

It just got real.