Immanuel Lutheran Church, Flattville, IL

Background

This organ, located in a small midwestern farming community, started life as Opus 814 of the Verlinden Organ Company of Milwaukee, WI. It originally had tubular-pneumatic action ventil windchests. An extremely poor quality "rebuild" c. 1990 provided the instrument with new wind chests and some pipes. Within two years the chests were failing even as new pipework was falling over. John-Paul Buzard was able to work with the congregation to educate them about what the organ needed, and had not received in the previous work. A videotape was made of the interior of the instrument, which was shown to the congregation as part of this learning process. The congregation responded with total support to rebuild the instrument properly.

Scope of the Rebuild Project

Buzard Pipe Organ Builders of Champaign, IL, signed a contract in 1995 to completely rebuild the instrument as their Opus 16, with 18 stops and 21 ranks. It retains the original case and facade, with the keydesks and a roll-top built into the center of the case.

The scope of the project included:

• new keyboards and pedalboard;

• new tilting tablet stop and coupler controls;

• new Peterson solid state relay and combination action;

• new electric action slider chests for the manual pipework;

• new windchests for the Pedal stops;

• new blower and wind system within the organ case;

• retention of as many of the existing Wangerin pipes as possible;

• additional stops (*) in harmony with the existing pipework.

The work included the following Peterson components:

• diode matrix relay;

• duo-set combination action;

• swell and crescendo pedals and accessories;

• swell shade controller;

• Z-bracket tilting tablet unit;

• pedal key contact assemblies;

• chime action and chimes;

• slider motor controllers.