The project
The collector acquired the instrument at auction with no playing history available and significant visible damage: the main bellows leather had been chewed through in multiple places, two wooden pipes had cracked seams from decades of humidity swings, and the case finish had been stripped at some point by a previous owner. Bellows leather was fully replaced to match the original weight and grain direction, the cracked wooden pipes were re-glued and cleated rather than replaced (the original wood retains the instrument's specific voice), and the case was refinished using a period-appropriate shellac process rather than a modern lacquer.
Because no playing history or original stop-list documentation survived with the instrument, the six-stop specification was reconstructed by close physical examination of surviving pipe scaling and toe-hole sizing rather than assumed from a similar-period reference instrument.