Well, some may wonder what I have been doing lately.  Until finished
recently I had a tall-case orchestrion to rebuild.  It could not be
"restored" because so much of the interior workings had been removed.
The owner came to me because he had intended to do it himself over the
last thirty years he has owned it.  However it is a _big_ job and he
had a house full of other things demanding his attention.

The instrument was built by Kuhl and Klatt with an accordion, bass
drum, snare drum, and crash cymbal.  Everything else was missing.
The original stack played only 52 notes, I believe, and so a new
73-note stack was built for it.  All the other instruments he had
bought to put in it came from Ragtime West and Player Piano Company.

After thirty years sitting on the shelf, I had to rebuild all of them
mostly using Denis W.'s new plastic valve blocks.  I will still need to
build a new xylophone as there is no way the one he bought will play
well enough even after I rebuilt it once already.  New drum actions had
to be built as well.  The system now has a primary valve chest for fast
repetition.  All the percussions are also run from the primary valves
so the repetition is fast, fast.

I built a pipe chest and that has flute and violin pipes.  We will be
doing some more voicing on them soon, as I had to rescale them from
church organ pipes the owner had found and that included turning them
from long, stoppered, soft flutes to shorter open louder pipes that
would be heard over the piano.  They are now on open toe voicing as
well.

The owner had a rather unusual request and of course the customer is
always right.  He gave me two fairground organ statues of identical
ladies who were never on an organ but had a movable hand for playing
a bell.  I found a pair of ten-inch cymbals and automated the ladies
so they both play rhythm cymbals along with the bass drum.  There was
a matching oak shelf built for each lady to stand on.

The original lighting was kept but the accordion lights were way too
bright so they were wired in series to dim them and to make their bulbs
pretty much last forever.  I added a light in the spoolbox as I normally
do with most home players.

I have put up one video on YouTube of the beast.  There is also a video
from the local Fox affiliate station local news segment.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grgoqzOhlCc
  http://www.myfoxstl.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=5754771

Doug L. Bullock
http://www.pianoworld.us/
Alton, Illinois (St. Louis)