Services |
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| James Musselwhite & Assoc. used to tune and maintain Pipe Organs across Canada, from their home base in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. | ||
| There are thousands of Pipe Organs in Canada, old and new,
large
and small, but they all need regular maintenance in order to survive
the
great extremes of the Canadian climate. |
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| Regular tuning is just one part of maintaining a pipe organ. Simply cleaning is important, for dust, foreign objects, insects and rodents play havoc upon the internal mechanism, and the sound. Often, all a good organ needs to correct imperfection in tuning is just a gentlewipe of the pipes mouth with a feather. | ||
| Many of the organs we serviced are operated by a small current of electricity, charging a small magnet. However, organs built early in this century suffer from the builders lack of knowledge of how electricity operates. An average sized instrument may have hundreds of these magnets, each of which having an individual positive feed, but all sharing the same return. This causes as backlog of electrical flow. As a result, when many stops are activated, some notes will fail to play. In extreme cases, this may even pose a fire hazard. To correct this, re-wiring is needed. | ||
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Over the course of time, leather will become brittle and crack, and wood will shrink and split. Repairing or replacing of these materials is a common part of regular maintenance. Most of the time, these items must be custom made, and a great deal of knowledge and experience is essential in their fabrication. | |
| From time to time, we were called upon to add new parts to older organs, expanding their size and usefulness. New metal pipes are ordered from Germany, while new wooden pipes, windchests, reservoirs and windlines were handmade in our shop. |  |
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| From tuning to cleaning,
electrical work
to woodwork, James Musselwhite & Associates strived to provide the
highest quality of service possible. |
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