Hammond e100 e112 repair successful

The repairs that I made to my Hammond e112 were successful. 

This organ was given to me by a good friend.  I picked it up at his home about 2 years ago non-functional.   The motor started but only the C tone and the A tone barely sounded.  I immediately knew that there was a problem with the tone generator.  

I took the organ with the bench to my garage. I did not get the pedals from him and he did not know what happened to them.  

The organ sat in my garage for a year before I had the chance to look at it.  I was forced to look at it when a church pastor contacted me about the organ through a colleague.  I told the Pastor that I would take a look to see if the repairs would be simple. If I could get it working in a week, I would sell it to him. I found that it needed too much work to get it working fast and it needed a set of pedals. I told him that I could not sell it in this condition. I could have sold it as is but I also wanted a chance at repairing a Tone Wheel Generator and this was it.

Upon visual inspection of the organ, I found that it did have a problem with the tone wheel generator (TWG).  It is difficult to see inside of the tone generator when the organ is fully assembled and through the back of the organ.  I did notice that the Vibrato scanner was not turning.  This certainly meant that the Vibrator Scanner was frozen and a torque spring on the tone generator popped loose.  This is a common problem with the e100. I had to lift up the scanner to see under it before I tried to free the vibrato scanner. 

To lift the scanner up, I had to remove the top covers, move many wires and cables out of the way,  and remove the preamp.  This is a tedious process where care must be taken to prevent damage. I did not desolder the wires on the TWG because I assumed that I could just lift the TWG high enough to put a torque spring back in, oil it up and the generator would spill normally again. Sometimes the motor torque spring will snap on these organs and it is easy to replace. But when the torque springs inside the TWG pop out, they can be very hard to put back in and you have to dissemble complicated things to get at them.

There are torque springs along the length of the TWG drive shaft.  There is one big torque spring next to the motor and as the drive shaft goes to the other end of the TWG, there are torque springs for each major section of the TWG.  The torque springs serve two purposes:  One is to keep the shaft regulated as the motor  reacts to changes in frequency.  The organ receives its frequency at 60 hertz from the electrical circuit in home or church.  This is the reference that is used to keep the Hammond organ in tune.  In Europe, the organ is referencing 50 hertz; therefore, the Hammond Europe TWG organ uses a different motor gear to put the organ in tune. The second use of the torque spring is to keep the shaft from bending during motor start up.  The motor will jerk forward to turn the shaft. This powerful force would bend the shaft and do damage to the Vibrato Scanner. In addition, if there are any obstructions ( a very bad thing), the motor will force the shaft and destroy everything in its path.  

To make this more complicated, there are also torque springs on each tone wheel assembly in the TWG.  If you break one of these, you are facing a major problem.  I don't know if I would even dare to disassemble a TWG to fix one.  It may be impossible. Study the Tone Generator here:  http://b3world.com/hammond-techinfo.html

I removed the main anchor bolts on the TWG and carefully lift it up. I used a block of wood to hold it up and to keep it from sliding. It is heavy and delicate with wires still attached.

A bent and broken torque spring was lying on the deck.  This was trouble for me because I did not have a replacement and all my efforts in contacting Hammond parts vendors did not pay off.  One of them told me that it was impossible to get one and it would be impossible to put it in.  That was enough for me to seriously consider tearing the organ down and selling the parts.  

I happened to contact a company that makes torsion springs.  They asked me to mail them the broken spring for evaluation.  To my surprise, I received five new springs in the mail within two weeks.  The springs were exactly the specifications on the old spring.  They also sent a specification letter with the spring explaining its torque specifications.  I was elated, excited, buzzed, and just plain happy!  The company sent these at no cost and informed me that if I needed more, there would be a cost.  

Now I had to get the spring back in the TWG.  It took a pair of extra long needle nose pliers and a set of dental tools to get the spring back in position.  It was very hard to do. It took careful practice to learn how to maneuver the spring with the pliers and the dental tools. Once I got it into position, the spring had to clip into a tiny hole in the bearing on both sides without bending the spring out of shape! When it finally rested properly, I had my own party in the garage.  

When doing work like this on a TWG, always turn the TWG by hand and observe the entire drive shaft for binding.  I set down mirrors under the TWG and turned the TWG slowly by hand to watch the mechanical action.  I had to squirt  Hammond Oil on each bearing station to get them turning smoothly.  The last bearing before the Vibrato Scanner was binding badly.  You can tell by the way the torque spring before it was behaving.  I had to squirt extra oil.  To get it real loose, I had the pain of getting the cover off the Vibrato scanner so that I can get some oil on the bearings in there too.  The inside of the Scanner was clean but very dry.  The absence of allot of oil was good but it needed a small dab of oil on it's main bearing.  I turned the Vibrato Scanner and the motor shaft without electricity slowly until the oil took affect. 

I am brave now.  The organ is oiled now and I am ready to turn on the motor to see if the TWG will spin freely.  I oiled each tone wheel bearing manually and let the oil soak in for a few hours before I turned on the motor.  

Surprisingly, this organ is in original condition on the inside.  It looks as if it was never taken apart after it was built at the factory.  It had an easy life and just needed a good dusting on the inside.  It also had it's original factory tubes which made me question the capacitors and resistors in the amps.  After some research, I found that Hammond switched to the better components in this organ era.  All should be OK for the startup.  The moment of truth came as I plugged in the power and turned on the motor.  The TWG started up and settled normally. I was successful!  The new torque spring did it's job and the TWG was spinning well. The next step was to reconnect the amps to see if I could get sound from the generator. 

I took out my wood block jack stands and set the TWG back down on its moorings.  Next I temporarily reconnected the preamp, amp,  and the ground wires.  I fired up the organ and the tubes warm up. No red tubes and no pops and crackling from the amps.  I walked around to the front and started pressing keys.  I was getting sound!!! 

The TWG was transmitting all harmonies. As I moved switches and draw-bars, the organ groaned, popped, and scratched but it all worked.  It was off-line for a very long time and now it had to wake up and run.  It seemed to want to wake up slowly but it was on its way.  I let it idle for a few hours as I went to run  other errands and to ponder what I should do next. When I returned, it was still idling good.  It will need a new filter cap. It is humming and popping and I can tell that it is coming from the main amp filter cap.  I will replace it soon.

The next step was to deal with all the broken keys on the consoles.  I found an auction on Ebay that included a complete set of diving board keys from an L100 organ.  I won the auction and received the box of keys after one week. Replacing the keys took two days.  Someone dropped something heavy on them. Thank goodness that the key combs were in like new condition.  It takes time to get to the point where the keys are replaced.  Many parts were removed and moved out of the way to get to the keys.  I did the lower tier first.  I was surprised to find that there was very little dirt and crud in the beds.  This organ was like new and must have been kept covered in a house.  I replaced all the keys and the organ started to look better. 

This organ did not come with a set of pedals.  In my hunt for the pedals, a Hammond technician had a very beat up set up pedals. I bought them for about $25 and they needed a complete restoration to make them work.  I am still missing the two upper pedals and decided to make them from wood stock.  I stripped them, sanded them, and put several coats of heavy duty urethane.  The natural wood was dry rotted on the bottom edges so I decided to paint the casing dark brown with a good vinyl paint.  I left the white pedals natural with a good three coats of heavy urethane.  The black pedal wood also received a coat of dark brown paint.  At this writing, I still have not made the missing pedals in the forlorn hope that I will find them on Ebay or something.  However it looks like I will have to make them.

Black Pedals Painted Brown they look good!

finished pedals missing upper pedals

Overall, the pedals are beautiful.  I replaced all screws with new brass screws.  

I put the organ back together and discovered that there are other problems.  

One problem is in that the pedals are not working.  There is sound but they do not sound the harmonies which tells me that there is a grounding problem from the contact switches.  UPDATE: The pedals are now working! Thanks to online schematics at http://www.captain-foldback.com/Hammond_sub/schematics/eseries/index.html,  I was able to trace the pedal signal to the white wire on the Pedal Frequency Divider Board.  The clear (pedal) wire goes to the white wire. It is a simple solder repair thank you.  The next problem with the pedals is that I was over zealous on the felt under the pedals. Some are not making contact with the switches.  I will have to cut the felt in half to compensate.  A sharp razor will do it.  

The other problem is that I found another broken key on the top tier.   This means that I need to open it back up and go through the tedious process of getting to it.

UPDATE: The reverb is not working.  It may be an input or output problem in the cable too.  The tube seems to be working in the amp. 

WISH LIST:

• Install a Trek II OBL-2 Line out box.  This will allow me to connect a Neo Instruments Ventilator and provide the way connect the Tone Wheel to my main mixing board. I do not have a physical Leslie nor do I have the extra space for one.  The Neo Instruments Ventilator will allow me the tone wheel sound and give me a fair sounding rotating speaker effect.  To the hard nosed enthusiasts, there is no replacement for the wood tone of a Leslie but I do not have the space and I want to record directly. 
• The pedals may receive a MIDI interface so that I can use other bass sound fonts. I have separate Midi keyboards for the upper solo
• I may install a Trek II string bass interface but it will not be necessary if I go with the Midi on the pedals 
• The new Hammond E112 may have two new Ubuntu Linux computers and a Windows 7 computer integrated in the cabinet  The original amplifier and speakers will be removed to an outside sound cabinet or eliminated if I like the Neo Instruments Ventilator
• Replace the dated 1965 speaker cloth with Black Cloth. I may mount my rack mount amps in there.  I have a vintage Crown amp that may look good in there
• I may chop the organ and use the pipe organ pedals with MIDI. Racks must be built around the console to mount my MIDI keyboards and control surfaces

Stand by for more to come.........