Welcome to "Bringing Back Baby"

Welcome to "Bringing Back Baby", a blog about restoring a Hammond M3 spinet organ (also known as the "Baby B3") to operation. My name is Frank, I live in the state of Vermont in the USA, and I'm an electric bass player, not a keyboard player. So what the heck is a bass player doing with a Hammond organ? Read on....

I've always loved the sound of the Hammond organ, probably due to my growing up in the 70's listening to a lot of rock bands using the organs in their music. My first love is the bass, but I have had a moderate interest in learning to play keys for a number of years. Also, for reasons I can't totally explain, I've had a fascination with the idea of owning some vintage instruments, especially keys (besides the Hammond organ, think Wurlitzer/Rhodes electric pianos).

So just a few weeks ago I was innocently scanning Craigslist and there it was, in the "free" section: "Free Hammond M3 organ - Doesn't work". Wow! A free Hammond organ! I already knew about the M3 - a smaller version of the famous B3 organ, with the electro-mechanical tonewheel tone generation system. The pictures attached to the post showed a M3 spinet that looked to be complete and in decent shape, except there were no tubes in the amplifier, and no speaker. The owner did mention in the post that it had been converted to 1/4" preamp output. While I was somewhat concerned about the condition of the amplifier, I have a degree in electronics (and my other hobby is ham radio) so I felt pretty confident I could fix whatever might be wrong.

I have gained enough wisdom over a number of years of marriage to know I needed to check this with my wife... small radios, bass guitars, etc. are pretty easy to sneak into the house, but not an organ! Her response was "if you're really going to fix it and use it, then OK... I don't want a project sitting around for years though!". Yes indeed, my wife knows me well... so with that tacit approval in hand, I sent an email to the organ's owner and a meet to look at the organ was quickly set up.

I met up with the owner in his garage/practice room and found out that he had bought the organ off someone in the mid-Hudson valley, and it did not have a speaker in it at that time. A friend of his converted the amp to 1/4" preamp output and he successfully used the organ for some time... until it suddenly "died" on him. He pulled the tubes to use as spares for his other Hammond, a nice A-100. We powered the M3 up, and the tonewheel generator seemed to spin up nicely. Everything else, other than the amp, seemed solid and I had no reason to doubt that it was working as he claimed until the amplifier died. After long and careful deliberation (about 1 minute) I said "I"ll take it!". It took a few more days to round up a friend with a pickup truck and some extra help to move it to my garage.

Here's a few pics of "Baby" right after she arrived at my place:




So now on to the rebuild and hopefully a new life for this "Baby B3". Why blog about it? Well to be honest, I think putting my effort out in public will spur me on to complete the job. Hopefully along the way, you'll find this blog to be informative, maybe a little entertaining, and possibly will inspire someone else to tackle bringing their old organ back to life!