Practical Organ Building

by W. E. Dickson

The three component parts are thus worked together.

The languid is placed on the wide opening of the foot, and the windway formed by leaving a narrow slit between the straight edge of the languid and the flattened lip of the foot. The two are then neatly soldered together. The body is then soldered to the foot, care being taken to adjust the mouth exactly opposite to the windway.

The larger pipes have ears, namely, rectangular pieces of metal soldered on each side of the mouth.

Thus completed and cleaned over, the pipes are handed to the voicer.

It will be remembered that we left a wooden pipe, similarly put together but unvoiced, in an earlier portion of this book. We have now to explain that both classes of pipes pass through a similar or analogous course of treatment at the hands of the voicer.

With small metal tools, called notchers, of which he has four or five, he cuts a row of nicks in the straight edge of the languid, causing it to resemble somewhat the edge of a saw. These nicks or notches, coarse or fine, close together or at rarer intervals, as the case may be, conduct the sheet of wind from the foot-hole against the upper lip of the mouth, and influence to a most important extent the character of the tone.

Fig. 44.

In a similar way, and using a file ground to a saw-like edge, the operator on a wooden pipe cuts nicks in the slightly bevelled upper edge of the block, and continues or prolongs these notches obliquely across the front of the block, letting them die away or come to nothing at their extremity. Fig. 44 shows the front of a block thus treated.

The art of the voicer, however, is by no means expended upon this notching of the languids and blocks. It extends to the accurate and nice adjustment of the height of the mouth, the aperture of the foot-hole, and the width of the windway. All these will bear strict proportion to the scale or size of the body of the pipe, and to the weight or pressure of the wind.