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Sound technical content, curated with aloha by
Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Pine Beach, NJ

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Weight Of Organ Pipes

Q. I am a structural engineer and have been asked to advise on the restoration of choir loft, which will involve raising the organ pipes off the floor & onto a platform over the choir stars. I have no idea however, what the pipes weigh. Apparently there are 6000 of them in total, of varying sizes.

Can anyone help or advise?

Malcolm B [surname deleted for privacy by Editor]
- London, United Kingdom
2002

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2002

A. Malcolm,

Why in the heck did you come to this site for an answer?

I think that it would be simple to find out the diameter and thickness of these pipes, what material they are made of ... and calculate very easily the weight, eh? Heck, even I could do that and I sure ain't no structural engineer!

The other solution, if you are lazy like me, is to go to a supplier of organ pipes and ask them. OK?

I hope that the above info has taken a weight off your shoulders!

Freeman Newton [dec.]
R.I.P. old friend (It is our sad duty to
advise that Freeman passed away 4/21/12)

A. Just a suggestion, but but an organ manufacturer could help?

Marc Green
anodizer - Boise, Idaho
2002

A. You could measure them (length, diameter, wall thickness) and calculate weight from that. With 6000 pipes, you'd probably want to do some estimating in groups of similar sized pipes to reduce the time taken to measure.

Or you could physically remove a small number of typically sized pipes and weigh them, then calculate an estimate for the total.

Bill Reynolds [deceased]
consultant metallurgist - Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
We sadly relate the news that Bill passed away on Jan. 29, 2010.
2002

A. The way to do this is to find out what the material is that the organ pipes are made of. Take care with this step because the pipes of different sizes will probably be of different materials. I have seen an organ with wood, brass and lead pipes all in the same instrument.

Having found the materials list you will need to find the materials weight per unit volume for each material.

Next, calculate the volume of this material in each pipe. If you assume the pipes are right, circular cylinders you will probably be pretty close.

The calculation is 3.142 x diameter x length x thickness x weight per unit volume.

John Holroyd
- Elhorn, Wisconsin
2002

2002

A. That was a damn good response from Marc Green's dawg! A crittur of intelligence, I'd say. Sure needs some app(l)aws from us disadvantaged guys who are without dawgs.

Freeman Newton [deceased]
(It is our sad duty to advise that Freeman passed away
April 21, 2012. R.I.P. old friend).

Marc, Marc, Marc. Hey that sounds just like a dog with a cleft palate.

A 6,000 pipe organ is big and I mean BIG. The oldest organs were made in about 300 BC and there have been a lot of companies making them since then. Most of them are defunct. As the original question came from England I assumed that this was an old organ and that, most probably, the manufacturer was no longer in business. I therefore assumed..........

I hate to admit this but you do have a point about manufacturers. I suppose someone such as the Redundant Organ Rehousing Company Ltd. may have some useful information. Honest, that is a real company WWW.rorcl.co.uk

Sample information read, absorbed and will respond by email.

Cheers

John Holroyd
- Elkhorn, Wisconsin
2002

2002

Ahhhh.. I was wondering how long it would take our resident Canadian to start talking about hockey ... sigh .. it's too bad that in a few years or so, the NHL teams in Canada will eventually fold (even hockey players won't play for 60 cents on the dollar). And.. we'll seeya in 2006, Freeman.. be ready!

Marc Green
anodizer - Boise, Idaho
(We'll get even in 2006)

thumbs down sign Thanks for all your replies, even the unnecessary ones. I asked this site because my search engine found it when I raised the query. Although perfectly able and adept at calculating the weights of many things (I even know all the formulae), the organ is 600 miles from where I am and until its stripped down the pipes are inaccessible to take a representative sample.

I just thought someone might know, or know how to find out. Hope you all find something better to do than answering queries from engineers. If you didn't like the question why bother to answer.

Malcolm B [returning]
- UK
2002

Sorry, Malcolm! We certainly don't run this site for the purpose of offending people :-( Apologies!

I've asked Freeman to not chase visitors away with "Why did you come to this site?" -- but he is a loveable character, as you'll see if you stick around, and that just seems to be his style of introducing himself on a lot of threads :-)
The site is attended by a "community of characters" who each contribute their unique personality, inseparable from the priceless experience & technical knowledge they offer free of charge on thousands of threads ... and often we learn something quite interesting, like that entry about the Redundant Organ Rehousing company :-)

But this site focuses mostly on metal finishing, whether the object to be finished be organ pipes or anything else. So you submitted an inquiry, and we published it, and hoped for the best -- but this site focuses on metal finishing so our cast of characters and their field of expertise is sometimes of limited help when the subject is something else :-)

Thanks for the interesting inquiry, and apologies again!

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

Junior Sales Representative - Resintech, Camden, NJ
Nadcap Chemical Processing Auditor - PRI, traveling
Process Engineer / Chemist - Denver Metal Finishing, Colorado

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