People seem shocked that a guy my age knows

how to work on Hammond Organs. So I decided to

document a complete restoration I'm doing to a B3

chop. Enjoy

 

The back of the B3 chop before disassembly

The manuals sitting on the cart ready to be disassembled.

Service here included, cleaning all the switches, removing

and cleaning all the bus bars, cleaning the key combs,

removing the old dried up grease on the preset lock, re lube the

lock, repairing some damaged wiring discovered on the underbelly,

cleaning the draw bars, removal and cleaning of all the keys, and of

course removal of the dreaded caustic foam.

The key bed being disassembled. Notice all the grime.

Reinstalling the bus bars after cleaning them.

The bus bar shifter. Not knowing the service history

of this organ, and knowing it sat in a barn I opted to

remove and clean all of the bus bars.

Here's a shot of the resistance wires. In this case the

 foam hadn't caused any damage so all that was

 required as to remove the foam and tie down the wires.

I realized while putting this page together that I failed

to get a picture of the dreaded foam.

Here is a before and after pic of the keys. I opted

to clean them here. May not have been necessary

but I think it added a nice touch,.

Time to rewire the presets.

almost done

Done.

The key bed wires before reassembling. This is fun as

the wires like to get mixed up.

Here's a quick pic of the tonewheel generator.

There's the run motor and the vibrato scanner.

Here's what the inside of the scanner looks like.

The first is a picture of the brushes and the second

is inside the main unit, notice the spindle and the stationary

plates around the outside., Basically this is an automated

variable capacitor. It's good to clean the excess oil out of

the scanner to prevent shorts that mess up the sound.

Here it is, key bed and tone generator re installed and waiting

to be rewired.

 

Here's a silly little video I took demonstrating a loose drawbar .

 

...and here's a video of me disconnecting the tone wheel generator.