Metalworking in the Purest Form

[TomG]

I came across the Facebook page for a pipe organ builder in the U.K. called Shires Organ Pipes Ltd. and was blown away by the amount of information, photos and videos they provided on hand making pipe organs. They cast the sheet for the pipes out of 80/20 tin/lead alloy, hammer them to eliminate the porosity, hand plane and scrape them to thickness, then roll them into tubes, solder the seam and construct the languid, mouth and foot before soldering that all together. The guy doing all of this work on the videos makes it look easy, but I can only imaging how difficult it must be to solder together something that has nearly the same melting point as the solder being used to join it.

If you click on the photos, it opens them full size and you can step through them (there are hundreds).

Tom

Shires Organ Pipes