This was the last major thing that I accomplished before putting the organ on hold for the spring busy season. I am using junction boards from Peterson Electro-Musical Products as recommended by Gene Bedient. The junction board is mounted in the console and has one pin for each pipe in the organ. The wires come from the relay to the corresponding pin. That pin is electrically connected to a second pin on the same board. That second pin receives the connector from the cable leading to the chest. The cable can be easily disconnected from the junction board if a chest needs to be removed in the future. I think it works pretty well. Check out the album of photos below and it will make sense. Here's how I did it:
I began by cutting the wires coming from the key contacts and relay. I was extremely careful to keep them in the right order. Note: I have found that a crocheting hook (pictured above my ear in one of the photos) is extremely handy for grabbing the right wire out of a bundle. The existing wires in the console are cotton covered (not color coded) and I carefully bundled them in the right order as I took them out of the old junction boards. I also spaced them out to properly align with the pins on the new junction boards. I trimmed the excess wire and stripped off the cotton. I used a nifty wire winding tool (Thanks, Gene!!) to wrap each wire around its pin. I then organized and bundled the wires coming from the pedal contacts and attached each of them to their corresponding pins. With everything in place, I soldered all the wires to their pins and mounted the junction boards back in the console.
It sounds simple, but with over six hundred wires to get on the right pins it was a rather tedious process. I still need to attach the connectors to the chest cables, but this will be a realtively easy task since I already rewired the chests with color coded wire. The finished junction boards are pictured below. Click on the blue link under the picture ("From New Junctions") to see an album of photos showing what I did, more or less step-by-step. Once you are in the Picasa album, you can click on any of the pictures to see it with much greater detail.
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| From New Junctions |
