The Rebirth of a Classic

The Hammond organ, the most well known classic keyboard of all time. The hammond was poplar in rock, blues, jazz, prog, gospel, funk, and various other genres of music. The most famous of the hammond organs was the B3, commonly played through a leslie rotating speaker, as seen below.

I got intrigued by the idea of owning a real hammond organ, but at $3000 plus, it seemed a little unrealistic. Of course, there are other great sounding hammond organs such as the M3. The M3 is a spinet model commonly referred to as the "baby B3" because of its use of basically identical parts to the B3, minus the 61 note manuals. The advantage to the M3 is of course the price (generally around $100). I started searching craigslist for an M3 and came across on in nonworking condition for 200 bucks. I decided to go take a look at it and found it to be in pretty decent shape. All the tubes warmed up and the start motor worked, but the tone generator just wouldn't spin. I figured this 54 year old instrument should be pretty easy to fix, so I talked the guy down to 80 bucks and took it home. Heres a picture of what it looked like when I brought it home.

After about 5 minutes of tinkering with it, I found that the drive gear on the starter motor was stuck. I moved it a bit with my finger and It worked! Everything worked perfectly and it sounds great! They just don't make stuff like they used to...


See "Rebirth of a classic part II" to see where the project goes from here.

Rebirth of a Classic part II

Sometime in october 2010

The Hammond organ sounds great and all, but have you ever tried to move one? The M3 is just a spinet, but it still weighs roughly the same as a geo metro. I plan on bringing this thing to gigs so I needed to do something about the weight, or at least the bulkiness. A common remedy to this problem is to "chop" it, basically cutting the case down to a more manageable size. Heres a common example.

I didn't really like the idea of cutting up a classic hammond organ, so I decided to build a new cabinet instead.

The disassembly

The organs, uh, "organs"

I wanted to includes some similar styling to the B3, while also being a bit more unique. I decided to use red oak, combined with classic tweed cloth for that vintage look. Heres the start of the case.

After some veneer 

And some mahogany stain

Heres the top wrapped in tweed

Some test fitting of the components

Got the cheek blocks covered

 


Heres a view of the guts

I wanted to still have easy access to the internals, so I decided to make the top hinge open. You can see the piano hinge on the back and a view of the top open.

I built the legs so that they can fold up when you take the Hammond off.

After some stain.

I got some nice heavy duty handles for carrying it.

I built the amp into a removable box that fits on the underside of the organ. The amp connects to the rest of the organ with two 12 pin connectors. I would like to find some nicer metal connectors though.

I used a standard computer type power plug, so if I loose the original a replacement won't be hard to find.

These are all the different pieces when it is all disassembled.