The project
Decades of inconsistent heating in an unused hall had taken a heavy toll: reservoir and windchest leather had dried and cracked throughout the instrument, a significant number of pneumatic motors no longer held their seal, and the original relay — the electro-pneumatic system that translates a key signal into a pipe valve action — was failing intermittently across multiple divisions. The full instrument was removed division by division, every leathered component was stripped and releathered to original specification, and the relay was rebuilt using the original wiring diagrams as a reference rather than replaced with a modern solid-state substitute, preserving the instrument's original electro-pneumatic character.
Full-organ testing after reassembly took three additional weeks beyond the original schedule, tracking down two intermittent dead notes traced to hairline cracks in individual pneumatic motor leather that had not failed during bench testing.