First, what I didn't do: the organ is still in my garage. The plan is still to move it into the basement in the next week or two.
Now, on to what I did accomplish:
1) Added carrying handles I had bought a couple folding metal "chest" handles at Lowes back when I purchased the casters for the organ dollie. I've gone back and forth on the idea of installing them on the sides of my M3. I finally decided the cabinet of the organ is nowhere near mint, so drilling some holes and bolting some handles on that will make picking the organ up easier wasn't sacrilege. Here's the end result on one side:
2) Installed the strain relief on the power cord This job wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. The strain-relief is two piece, just slips over the cord; then you compress it with a pair of pliers and shove the whole thing into the same shape/sized hole in the amplifier chassis (this amp obviously had one of these before). Here's the procedure:
(1) Slip strain relief over cord, slide second piece over other side of the cord
(2) Squeeze together with pliers and shove it into hole
(3) Swear several times because it isn't going into the hole
(4) Swear again several times because the pliers slipped
(5) Try sweet talking to the strain relief while shoving it into the hole
(6) Swear again several times
(7) Shout in relief as it finally lines-up and slips into the hole!
Now there's no chance of yanking the wires off the amp, or cutting the cord on the side of the chassis.
3) Install jack for new amplifier line-out This one involved drilling a new hole in the chassis. I decided on a 1/8" mono jack because there wasn't a whole lot of room on the chassis where I wanted it to go. I used the "temporary" cap I installed a couple weeks ago and wired it up to the new jack. I'm going to write this up in more detail in a future post, because a lot of folks try to use the "phono input" RCA jack that is located on the expression pedal housing as a line-out. This works, but the signal level is low at that point. My pick-off point is 1 amplification stage later than that factory jack.
What's left to do: I need to install the fuse holder, but I needed a 1/2" drill to make the hole for it near the power cord. Bought a drill bit on the way home tonight but didn't have time to do the job tonight. Then I need to fasten the chassis back down to the bottom of the organ cabinet, and remove the tubes to get ready for moving day.
Future projects: Once it's installed in the basement, I want to see if the power amplifer section of the AO-29 amp is still working. If so, I am going to remove the old 1/4" line out modification the previous owner installed, and install a transformer DI box in it's place with a balanced output for mixers/recording. I have several nice Jensen transformers of the type used for DI boxes so this will be a cheap and very useful modification.
After that, I'm going to consider re-capping the vibrato delay line. Maybe re-capping the tone generator, too. One of the drawbars (16') for the lower manual isn't working too well, so that will need some service. That might involve some major disassembly of the manuals so I might dive into a general cleaning/tune-up of all the drawbars and keys. That's also a job I might put off for awhile!
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