Church Organ Rebuild

St Paul's Church, Penketh has been in transition of late - we had to close and demolish the previous building as it had reached a state where it was no longer economical to maintain. The last service held in the building was in January of 2015, and services were moved into the Oaks Centre, just round the corner for the interim. The plan was to demolish the old building and build a new one, hopefully with a longer life-span. As it turned out, things moved very slowly, and nothing visible happened until mid-2016, when a contract was placed and the demolition began. You can view photos and videos of the building work on my web page.

The church had a rebuilt Compton Organ, which had served well, but was lacking in the variety of sounds it could produce. Various attempts at revoicing had produced little in the way of improvement, and the organist had more or less decided to scrap it and purchase a new digital organ. I suggested that it might be worth considering a DIY project - convert the keyboard and pedal board to MIDI and install a PC with software to do provide the audio sounds. That would enable almost any sounds to be generated, and provided flexibility for further changes in future. After some deliberation we decided this was worth a try!

In January of 2016 I stripped down the organ, which had been standing, unused, for the previous year. You can read about this here.

The organ case went into storage (Ivy Wilson's garage!) for the interim, those items required for work went into my workshop, and the remaining items were either scrapped or handed over to the firm that had handled maintenance of the instrument up to then.

Over the past two years, I have done various bits of work on things, plans have changed, evolved, and things are progressing slowly towards an organ. Unfortunately, I have not kept a very good record of this, and it was only recently that I have decided to review my web pages!

Here is a collection of images and description of the state of things in December, 2017.

Bill Purvis
December, 2017