Pipe Making Tour

Below is a photographic tour of our pipeshop, showing how we make new pipes, repair old pipes and rebuild them. As I find interesting photos of different kinds of projects, I'll put them up on the web site.

Pipemaking casting table

The molten metal is poured into a bottomless sled, at the left of the table. The sled is slid down the table, and the metal flows out a slit in the back-bottom of the sled, leaving a sheet of metal. In the photo, you see the sled two-thirds down the table. That metal is about 700 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pipeshop rolls of pipe metal

These are the sheets of pipe metal, rolled up and resting after casting.

Blair Batty, pipe metal hammering machine

Pipeshop metal hammering machine

There is a long tradition of hammering pipe metal after it has been cast, but before rolling up into pipes. This is our hammering machine, which operates pneumatically; its very noisy...

Blair Batty cutting mouths into organ pipes

Pipemaking cutting in mouths

You can see a stack of pipe bodies, still flat. Using porportional dividers and scribers, we mark the correct sized mouth onto the body, and scribe it in.

Pipemaking rolling bodies

Each pipe is rolled around a mandrel and rounded with the wooden beater. Then the join is soldered forming the tube of the resonator.

Pipework Foot squaring machine

After the pipe foot has been rolled and soldered, rounded, the tip formed and the lower lip flatted, thwe foot is held in this machine and a spinning lathe squares the upper edge. That gives straight standing pipes!

Blair Batty soldering pipe feet to bodies

Pipemaking attaching bodies to feet

Once the foot and body has been made they have to be attached. This photo shows Blair soldering the foot to the body. all the pipes needs now are ears soldered on and voicing.

Pipemaking reed resonators

You can see the Trumpet resonators, already rolled up and soldered. Here you can see the resonator being beaten round on a wooden tapered mandrel. You can see the mandrels to the right.

Pipemaking blocking reeds

We use this rotating platform to hold the resonator in the exact location, perpendicular to the block, so we can solder it together.

Pipeshop embossed pipe

Front pipes are sometimes embossed with patterns as decoration. Someone once challenged me to emboss a pipe..."

Organ pipes repaired

Our pipe shop frequently is asked to repair or restore damaged pipes, as seen in the before and after photos. As pipe makers and voicers, this is quite easy for us to do.

The foot metal was too thin to support the weight of the body. The pipes collapsed under their own weight badly damaging them. We made new feet of zinc (which is much stronger), rounded out the pipes, and put them back on speech.

Pipemaking Instruction & Plans

Pipemaking Files