Machinery – Page 2 – Maxwell Butler

Shop Update: To every Hammond BC, turn! Turn! Turn! There is a chorus generator, turn! Turn! Turn!

Further to the recent treatise on my descent into gooberdom, I brought home a supremely junked Hammond BC from a dusty field in Ojai for a song. It’s just about useless, but for its precious chorus generator that I will use in the restoration of another, chorus-generatorless BC. But will this donor generator even turn? I break out the widowmaker and give myself over to the whims of the goddess Fortune.

On the gluttonous maw of Martha’s Vineyard roads

My folks, of the hippie stardust that landed on the deer-ticked dunes of Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s and 70s, have lived down the same driveway in Aquinnah for the entirety of their five decades there. Locust Lane was a notoriously treacherous gash of gravel and sand that crept through the forest towards Pancake Hollow that down the years had swallowed buggies, pickups, and UPS trucks whole. Its prominent center hump, steep grades, loose stones, and tendency to flood which turned it into a bayou in summer and a solid glacier in winter meant it was only reliably passable by high-set 4×4, Subaru, or toboggan. All others were at their own peril. They always said it kept the Jehovah’s Witnesses away if nothing else.

The tragedy of the old organ, or: My well-intentioned waltz into abject gooberdom

I’m not on the same level as some of the true nutcases, staked out in grayed huts up the far Rural Routes of Minnesota or another Jello salad state. They laze about the internet, their forum signatures sagging under the weight of the dusty Orpheus Leslies and melted Hammond L-102s and forgotten Ensoniq this-and-thats that have drifted across their transoms over the past several eons. These are the real goobers. The junkies, the aficionados. The men who drive the same supercharged Buick Park Avenues they bought new in 1995, who also have barns full of IH Travelalls, Wisconsin skid-steer engines and AM broadcast transmitters from before the War. The American Pickers-type folks. I have always wanted to be this type of person, even though space, finance and good sense conspire against it.

Shop Update: Wiring the road organ for Leslie 122 and 147

After years of having only Leslie 147s and their equivalents, the Leslie 31H “Tallboy” will soon join the ranks once its rebuild is complete. In preparation, I’m outfitting my organs with 122 as well as 147 hookups. The excitement is palpable.

A treatise from within the clouds: Aboard Cape Air

From an October 2016 Facebook post

Flying Cape Air is, against its mainstream adversaries or, shudder, the bus, a rare treat. A treat, though, for refined tastes. Single-malt, small-batch, all that nonsense. In an era when even a modern jetliner can seem outdated, a piston-powered plane with only one pilot and where your weight dictates your seat is positively Rococo. A Brough-Superior versus a Kawasaki. Rudolph Valentino versus James Franco.

Make America Super Again

Folks get the wrong idea about me. Because my online dating profiles usually contained the 1968 Kinks lyric “I’m the last of the good old-fashioned steam-powered trains,” and I tend to surround myself with machinery old enough to collect Social Security, and I pronounce “#” as “pound,” I must be a certifiable codger, a stone-assed Conservative, bemoaning the curse of being born in le wrong generation, who would tell children to vacate his tract of grass-covered land if children had any desire to trespass upon a yard full of squirrel-nibbled oranges and stray cats.