Greetings all,  I was digging through the MMD Archives last evening
in search of information on crank organs.

Our museum would love to find a nice instrument which would be more
portable than any we have, and we need something which our guests and
their children could try to play without risking damage to an
historical piece.

Anyway, I noticed that there still is not much information on the
companies which build or supply these organs.  Nor is there a lot of
information at either mbsi.org or amica.org.  Some information was found
on the crank organ web ring (which was found only by chance) but still
rather little.

I know that there are a _lot_ of small organs out there being built,
we've considered doing it ourselves if we had a source for the playing
controls.  We like the idea of running a small instrument from a
programmable computer chip.

We had thought about getting a control unit and pipes and building the
rest.  Bellows and cases are easy.  We do have plans for a unit built
entirely from scratch, but that's a bit more time than we have to put
into this now.

So, who is building all the instruments we see in the publications?
Where are they?  How do we contact them?  And do they have a web page
with prices and ordering information?

Thanks

Andy Struble
Music House Museum, Traverse City, MI
http://www.MusicHouse.org/

 [ Andy, if you will gather the information from our readers and
 [ organize it, I will find a place for it in the MMD Sources list,
 [ http://mmd.foxtail.com/Sources/  -- Robbie