Curator's Column

The restored 50" and 100" reeds in the Solo Division.

We here at Boardwalk Hall do love a good challenge.  Organ building and restoration is often filled with repetitive tasks, but the real excitement is found in the difficult and unexpected tasks that inevitably come along with a project of this magnitude.

One of the more exciting projects we’ve taken on this year is the restoration of the high-pressure windchests in the Solo division.  The 50” chests for the 16’ Tuba Magna and 8’ Bugle have been playing but were running on borrowed time, relying on selective re-leathering and temporary fixes to keep them functioning.  Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, we were able to completely restore the chests to like-new condition. 

High pressure chests come with their own set of headaches, but these aren’t the first 50” chests we’ve restored, and we’ve learned plenty of lessons along the way.  We took particular care on these chests to make them as absolutely quiet as possible.  On such high pressure, even the tiniest wind leak can cause a great deal of noise, and the chest’s location – high up in the chamber and close to the grille – means any leak is immediately apparent in the room.  The cleaned pipes are back on the restored chests, and the results are nothing short of thrilling.  These two ranks add a blaze of tone that crowns the entire ensemble.

If two 50” chests are thrilling, then is one 100” chest more or less exhilarating?  Either way, it is double the pressure – both literally and figuratively.   The 100” 8’ Tuba Imperial chest has been offline for many years, fraught with wind leaks and engineering issues.   The chest was originally conceived as a 50” chest, but changes mid-construction saw the pressure doubled, with little consideration for the stresses placed on the action and structure of the chest.  Stop-gap measures over the years attempted to fix the issues without removing the chest from the chamber, but it was clear that the entire assembly needed to be removed and re-considered from the ground up.  Special leather pouches were made to withstand the high pressure, custom magnets wound to exhaust those pouches, and new structure introduced inside the chest strengthen it.  The combined effect is a chest that is finally reliable and the musical effect of a 100” stop under expression is icing on the cake!

Removal of the 16' Major Flute in Gallery II

As we continue our work in Gallery II, our excitement is taking on a different form.  The 5-stop pitman windchest is badly water damaged, and very little of it is salvageable.  While this isn’t a surprise, we were hopeful that at least a portion of the chest could be saved.  Though that wasn’t the case, there are numerous options available to us.  Do we buy a new chest?  We have Midmer-Losh windchests in storage from other instruments – is it worth it to retrofit one of them?  Should we build an entirely new chest ourselves?  Each of the options has benefits and drawbacks, but the discussions and debates are fantastic food for thought.

Creating cheer a from a challenge isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but we’ve come to expect the unexpected.  We will continue to work through the mundane tasks and to find joy along the way as we work towards completing the restoration of the incredible pipe organs at Boardwalk Hall!

Nathan