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Playable pipe organ is partially 3D printed

We’ve seen a lot of 3D printed instruments in the past, most notably several functional guitars, but now there’s a pipe organ added to the band.

User FPVSprint Music created the pipe organ in 123D Design over the course of around a month, working on the model an hour or so per day.

Printing took around four full days and used a entire spool of filament. We were told that is was due to waste material in the design phase, and printing the finished files should take around half that time.

Aside from the printed parts there’s a lot of extra components in here with the pipes themselves being PVC. There’s also some rubber bands to help the mechanical valves and a bit of woodwork to tie everything together.

So, the big question is: how does it sound? As you can tell from the video embedded below, it’s not too great.

The reason for this isn’t a flaw in the instrument itself, or the person playing, but with the blower motor needed to make it work. The one used here is far too loud which drowns out the music.

We’ve been told that a second version could be made which fixes this and other issues such as different mouth heights for the pipes. The current version, with its beta bugs, can be downloaded for free from Thingiverse.

Despite these problems the instrument still has range – “It has two registers, one of them is a open one and the other one is stopped,” FPVSprint Music says, “It has one full octave of pipes in every register and of course the same amount of keys (one octave too).”

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