The Voicing Machine

Our voicing machine is the very same one used by William H. Odell at the old Morningside Ave. shop in Yonkers. It was originally built at the old West 42nd Street works in the early 1920s for Caleb H. Odell, to his own design. The table, frame, toe and rack boards are all from solid pine.

The machine is essentially a 3 stop pitman windchest with an interchangeable set of toebaords and rackboards for varying scales of flue and reed pipes. There is also a 6 note bass block with interchangeable toe block and yokes.

One of our first tasks when we moved to the new facility was restorative work on this machine, and fitting it with a new winding system. The action of the machine is essentially the same as an Odell pitman windchest, the lone exception being that the primaries are single rather than two-stage.

When we started work on the machine, the primaries had been recently releathered, but unfortunately the changeover valves (which were covered with soot pulled in from the old boiler at the Morningside Ave. shop) had to be replaced. After being in storage for over two decades, many of the armatures of the original Odell-made maple-base primary magnets had rust and other deposits on them and were therefore unusable. We exchanged these for modern adjustable chest magnets, which we were able to install without making any modifications to the chest primary assemblies. We saved the original magnets for future restoration work. The original stop action tubes and zinc elbows were replaced, and the entire stop action assembly was rebuilt.

The action of the machine is quite crisp and has excellent repetition, as one would expect. The sliding keyboard is quite convenient, and has a very useful feature: in addition to the rocker-type stop controls, the tuning stop can be activated by simply pressing the hinged keyslip, which is easily done with one's thumb while holding a note on with the index finger.