CNC Punching Machine for Mechanical Organ Music - Project Overview

A brief overview video of my computer controlled punching machine made as a university project to automatically make perforated cardboard music books for mechanical fairground and street organs in my collection.

Footage was shot in Summer 2007 but until now never released; since then the machine has been working for me faultlessly, now operating at well over twice the speed you see in this video without risking accuracy. It has saved me many hours of laboriously manually punching music by each hole at a time, which I used to have to do with a sewing-machine like treadle operated punch, having first marked the positions of each hole on the card using a printed master roll of paper. This traditional way of producing organ books is still widely used today, but is incredible labour intensive.

More details of construction of my machine will be published on my website in the near future, but the actual punching and alignment mechanism I came up with is unique, totally unlike any existing CNC punching machine, and having numerous advantages over any other design I have decided to keep this out of the public domain.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Mechanical
• Organ
• Music
• CNC
• Punching
• Machine
• University
• Project
• Computer
• Numerically
• Controlled
• MIDI
• File
• Electronics
• Fair
• Fairground
• Street
• Dance
• Concert
• Barrel
• Steam
• Box
• Old
• Cardboard
• Card
• Kapmachine
• Draaiorgel
• Dansorgel
• Drehorgel
• Orgel
• Orgue

[pianolasociety]

well done! Hope you get a "1st" for it!

[fairorgan]

Thanks Adam, I already did, graduating with 1st Class Hons in Summer 2007.

[voxhumanapipe]

Very clever...but not very informative.

[fairorgan]

Thanks for your comments. It's not meant to be an informative video, just one to give a brief overview explaining the project, aimed primarily at an audience who may well have no prior knowledge of what a book-playing mechanical organ actually is. I'm not disclosing the novel punch mechanism design - I give a lot of my secrets away, but not this one!

[musicmachinesuk]

Great video Nick,

Looks like you spent quite abit of time working on it.

Ben

[fairorgan]

Thanks Ben, yes it took me many many hours designing, machining and constructing to achieve the finished result, but it was well worth it.

[robskisEHS]

Count of Luxemburg!

[wc1378]

This is very cool!



[er10b]

@SteamboatWilley yeah - i think so too.

[SteamboatWilley]

Fascinating. I wonder if you could get a fairground organ to play Niel Diamond's "beautiful noise" or the theme tune from Thomas the tank engine? I reckon both of these tunes would sound great on a fairgound organ.

[voxhumanapipe]

Well Nick, we do certainly need to get more people interested....and full marks for that.

At the MOOS meetings the "ageing" membership is always being discussed.

Years ago, when I got interested in organs there was virtually no information on how to do this or how to do that. I overcame all theses problems by trial and error. I now share my hints,tips & wrinkles with fellow enthusiasts. People won't get on board if there is not much data about.

I understand your point on the punch design patent.