This page has some pictures of my Hammond Model A organ. The first thing you notice is that the organ is housed on an A100 cabinet: Though you can tell from the lack of rocker switches to the left and right of the drawbars that it's definitely NOT an A100: The previous owner had an A100 and a Model A, and decided that, since he had an organ with essentially the guts of B3, it ought to look like a B3. And since the Model A had the B3-like cabinet, he accomplished his goal by swapping the guts of the two organs. He didn't show me the innards of the A100-in-a-Model-A, but I assume he had to deal with some of the same issues he had getting the Model A into the A100 cabinet. Here's what the guts look like: The original Model A and the A100 cabinets have something in common: the cabinet is shallower than the cabinets that were used for the CV, C2,C3, BV, B2, and B3 models. In the Model A100, the preamplifier/amplifier is mounted down below, but in the Model A, the preamplifier is mounted on some brackets that raise it above the right-hand end of the TWG, as shown in this picture: An adaptation that was made on this particular organ was the expression pedal--the picture below shows the rod that the previous owner made up to control the volume from the pedal. The problem was fitting it all into the rather shallow A100 case--even shallower than the Model A case it came from: You can also see that he mounted a small box under the preamp with a 1/4-inch phone jack, which makes it really easy to connect this organ to any amplifier or sound system--works great! Finally, there is no serial number plate or name plate (apparently the Model A did not have one when John bought it), but the the model and serial number information had been written by hand on the back of the expression control box like this: This picture is of the organ with the Leslie speaker I've been working on (see my Leslie Project and Another Leslie Project page):

Here's a picture of the Hammond M2 that I picked up last year in San Francisco for a dollar. The power transformer was blown, and the cabinet was in pretty rough condition. I was not sure what I was going to do with it at the time, but I decided that I would try to get it operational as a learning exercise, then decide whether to fix it up & sell it, or part it out. The first step was to locate a replacement for the M2's power amplifier, and that was a fairly easy task. I was able to find one quickly for about $50 including shipping. The Next Week . . . The replacement amp arrived in excellent condition, and I installed it in one evening. Imagine my relief when the organ fired up and worked (almost perfectly) on the first try! At first I thought there are some problems with the keyboards: not all drawbars are sounding at the high end of the keyboards. But wait! what I thought were problems were the result of the actual design of the M/M2/M3 series of organs. The smaller number of tonewheels means there aren't enough tones to support all of the harmonics for all 44 keys of the organ's manuals, and the M-series organs don't have foldback like the C and B series organs do. Here's what the M2's innards look like: The above picture shows the back of the M2 with the tonewheel generator mounted on the upper shelf behind just below the keyboards and the Power Amp on the bottom shelf. The above picture is a closeup of the business end of the tonewheel generator--the run motor and vibrato-chorus scanner (the roundy thing to the left of the rectangular box that houses the run motor). You can see four of the magnet rods that have the tomewheel pickup coils on their ends inside the tonewheel generator. And this is the Power Amplifier that I installed in the organ. Fortunately all of the spade lugs on the various wires were in good condition. Between that and the wiring diagram from the M Series Maintenance Manual I was able to get everything hooked up properly on the first try. Note: I later decided that the cabinet was too far gone to make this a worthwile restoration project and I began the process of parting it out. Thus this organ gave it's life to help in the restoration of other M series organs, and I made about $150 profit on this organ so far. The amplifer was sold on Ebay to someone in Switzerland, and the field-coil speaker went to someone in Hong Kong! I still have the Tonewheel Generator and both manual assemblies--minus the keys, which I traded for unstained keys for the B2 MIDI Controller project. The M2's white keys were all badly stained with the grey blotches common in the -2 series organs (apparently Hammond used a different plastic formulation during the time period that the M2, C2, and B2 were built, and the white keys tended to get these greyish blotchy stains from exposure to the sun).

All Pictures and Text (c) Copyright 2003 by Stephen Cyr Last updated July 7, 2003

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