First of all, thanks to all the listers who came to my aid with some excellent
advice about the 1988 Rieger with sticking notes in the Swell. Roy Redman and
Pieter Visser were especially helpful. I just got back from the church, and was
able to figure out what was going on. Here's the deal:

The Swell chest on this organ is BIG, so it has 3 pallets per note for notes
1-12 and 2 pallets per note for 13-18. When I arrived at the church, the heat
was not on, and notes 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 18 were all happily ciphering all on
one end of the diatonic chest). After some investigation, it turned out that all
of the pallets for notes 1-18 have little balancing pneumatics buried back
behind the pallets. These basically exert some pull when the note is off to help
counteract the wind force on the pallets and thus make it easier to press the
key. When the note is on, the pneumatics are inert, because they exhaust to the
note channel.

Anyway, the balancers are connected to the pallets by a wooden lever that pivots
at the center, and the fulcrum is a wire that passes through the bottom of the
pallet box and has a threaded adjusting nut on the outside. As it turns out,
some warpage of the pallet box with climate (I'm guessing) caused the fulcrum to
move a bit and tightened up the balancer linkage to the point that it wsa
actually pulling the pallets open a little when the note was off. Loosening the
fulcrum adjusting nuts a little (1/2 to 1 turn) took care of the problem. 

This is tricky in the bottom octave because there are 2 balancers for 3 pallets
-- one of the balancers is connected through a clever little nylon linkage to 2
of the pallets. So you have to be careful to adjust each balancer while
operating just the pallet(s) connected to that pneumatic. If the balancers
aren't adjusted equally, the key feels sloppy when playing. Backing off the
adjustment nut too far just makes the key more difficult to play.

You really do learn something new every day in this business. Thanks again for
all the help -- I wonder how many combined years of organbuilding experience are
on this list....

Larry Hawkins

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