organ progress

this website includes information about my journey building a homemade pipe organ!

it includes a timeline, helpful links, and maybe even some designs soon.

why?

simply put, i had a dilemma. i'd love to make an instrument, but making a digital instrument seemed lazy to me, and i'm good enough at electronics (yet) to build an analog synth. acoustic instruments are great, but it's quite difficult if i wanted to, say, make a piano. i'd love something with a keyboard, because i don't know how to play anything else really, but a piano is full of thousands (literally) of moving parts, and of course the strings. one day, out of the blue, i thought, "hey, why don't i make an organ?" i started doing some research, and eventually found a few of the links mentioned below, but i didn't really do anything, mostly just research. a few months later, and i was bored and remembered i did some research on organs and they didn't seem too hard to make. i started planning things out in freecad, but eventually i figured out i like drawing better, as it's such a simple design. thankfully, a flue pipe (the type of organ pipe i'm making) can be fully made out of wood, so i only need to spend money on wood and not some type of reed or string. anyways, if you read all of that, thanks! i appreciate you!

what's it made out of?

i'm using mahogany hardwood from a hardware store near me. the pieces are ~1" thick.

what tools are you using?

a chop, table, and bandsaw. also, i used wood glue and a nail gun to put the pieces together. more information on where these are used will be in the designs.

help! i have more questions!

get in touch with me on discord! my username is @carteeeee and i'd be glad to answer any questions you have!

i wanna say THANK YOU. SO MUCH. to all of the people who made these websites and the information on them. especially the first one. they've all been incredibly helpful to me to help design the pipes.

my main source for design! this has been time and time again the most useful website i've found for designing an organ, it's got designs for basically every part of it.

wikipedia is also an amazing source, it was incredibly helpful for scaling pipes properly and understanding the design and what is important to make it work.

i didn't really read much on here, the image is helpful though to see how long the resonator should be.

i'll add these here soon, but first i need to redraw the designs and clean them up.

roadmap of pipes i've made and future pipes i will make! numbers on the left are days.

green means i have already made the pipe on that day.

red means i will make the pipe on that day.

blue means on that day i already have that pipe.

2025-07-27: the first pipe is made

this pipe took about an hour and 45 minutes to make, although that's just from memory and looking at the times of the pictures i took, so it's not the most accurate source.

i made the pipe in the morning and tuned it later in the evening. it sounds a nice C4 (middle C) note.

you can swipe thru these images! 1 2 3 4 5 6

2025-08-10/11: 2 more pipes are made

these two pipes took about 2 and a half hours to make (in parallel). i had some trouble because i misrememebred the 20" length as 30" (for the G4 pipe) so i had to recut some pieces, but thankfully i had enough wood for both pipes!

the larger pipe is G4 and the smaller one is C5 (the C4 pipe is also in some shots for reference).

you can swipe thru these images! 1 2 3 4 5 6