Inside the Hammond L-100

After more playing and reading, I decided I really needed to get those drawbars working properly. There are numerous resources on the web with a wealth of information on Hammond tonewheel organs; this page describes what I did tonight.

Nearly all of the drawbars were really noisy when moved, and for a handful of them sound would drop out entirely on some settings. As I mentioned yesterday, the fundamental tone for the upper manual was one of these. It worked OK at lower settings, but from about 6 to 8 it would go silent unless I pushed down on the drawbar. Typically that drawbar contributes much of the tone of whatever my right hand is playing, and since my left hand is nearly useless, this was not a good situation.

So it was off to Radio Shack on my lunch hour to get some spray contact cleaner/lubricant, and tonight I opened up the organ once more.



It's a pretty complicated machine, and you can't even see the most complicated part of all, the guts of the tone generator.

Here's the back of the tone generator. Inside are dozens of gears and wheels and coils and magnets.



The spring reverb.



The synchronous motor, which is synchronized to 60 Hz AC power, and the reason these things never go out of tune. Note that it's attached to the tone generator via a spring; apparently the motor pulses a little, which would affect the sound in a bad, 60 Hz kind of way. The spring takes care of that. In some Hammonds, there's a second starter motor on the opposite end of the tone generator. Those models have two power switches that have to be turned on in a particular way; the L-100 just has the one.



Glowing vacuum tube goodness!



Here's the business end of the drawbars. I sprayed a little contact cleaner/lube in each of them, and worked the drawbars a little to clean them out. They work much, much better now. There's no noise or dropouts.



As far as I can tell, everything except the A flat pedal works now, though the mysterious "brilliance" tab doesn't seem to do a thing. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do; add brilliance, I guess. If you heard me play, you'd know that I could use a little brilliance.

A new instrument arrives

On Friday an old Hammond L-100 organ took up residence in our library. Grandma Thvedt saw an ad in the local paper and thought we'd like it. Grandpa and I went to look at it several days ago, and it was in pretty good cosmetic shape, and it functioned well, too, so Grandpa bought it as a gift for the kids. I think it was a pretty good deal at $25. We planned to come back later and wrestle the thing over here, but by Friday I'd thought better of that plan -- it weighs a ton -- and called a local moving company. It cost more to move it than to buy it, but I'm still well pleased with the bargain.

Since the arrival I've had a little time to read up on Hammond tonewheel organs, and to try all of the available settings. It has a few problems, but nothing really serious. The worst is probably the non-working A-flat pedal, but even that's not so bad. The pedals cover only one octave anyway, so they're already pretty limited.

Today I opened it up to do a little maintenance. They're meant to be oiled once a year. On the inside of the back panel, somebody had noted two dates when it had been oiled -- once in 1988, and once in 1992. I don't know for sure, but this organ probably was built some time in the first half of the 1960s. I'm a little curious about the care it's had over the decades.

Some of the drawbars, which are pretty much the whole reason you'd want an old Hammond, need their contacts cleaned, including most especially the one that controls the fundamental tone for the upper manual. I'll be opening it up again in the near future to tackle that job. I'll try to remember to take some pictures of the inside -- it's really something.

We're really having a lot of fun with it. I caught Thomas making some wild sounds on it by turning it off and on while playing. I put the kibosh on that. I read that Keith Emerson used to do the same thing on his L-100, but he also stuck knives between the keys to get sustained notes and some other pretty crazy things.

iPhoto 09 - Faces

I just upgraded to iLife 09. About the only new feature I've tried out is Faces in iPhoto. It is pretty cool. It scans the photo library, looking for faces. That takes hours, at least on old G4 Macs with large photo libraries like ours. Once that's done, you pick some photos with faces and identify those faces. After that, it will guess the identity of faces in other photos, and you can either confirm or change those guesses (see photo above). It's pretty good at guessing, but it's far from perfect. It often confuses Thomas and Ava -- not surprising, since they do look alike. It works best if the face is well-lit, facing the camera, not tilted, and without too much contrast. One pleasant surprise: after I tagged numerous photos with my own face, it correctly identified the first one it came across in which I had a beard.

It's especially good at identifying Johanna. I don't know if it's because she's the only redhead in most of our photos, or if she's just more aware of the camera than the other kids and is usually looking straight at the camera and posing.

The color of money

I finally got around to picking up a copy of Monopoly. I thought about getting an old one on eBay, but the standard edition is only $10, brand new. Oh, I could have got the electronic banker edition, or the Clone Wars edition, or the Indiana Jones edition for two to four times as much. I'm shocked that there wasn't a Hannah Montana edition. Perhaps they were just out of stock.

Anyway, old people like me will already have noticed something wrong with the picture above. Purple fifties and blue tens! The horror!

I played against the kids over the weekend -- Thomas and Ava as a team, Johanna & I each played alone. Ava lost interest pretty quickly, other than playing with the houses and hotels.

As Banker, I was constantly mistaking the blue tens for fifties. Despite this handicap, I was, after two grueling days, able to prevail over my opponents.

Apparently I just missed out on the old-style colors. It says here that they changed in August, after 60-odd years of the familiar white-pink-yellow-green-blue-tan-goldenrod.

Other changes: Mediterranean and Baltic are brown, not purple. The property deeds are narrower, which I think is good. The income tax is a flat $200 (I blame Steve Forbes), which is simpler, but not so good if you're poor. The design and some of the wording on the Chance and Community Chest cards has changed. The rules don't seem to have changed, but they've rewritten them to be easier to understand.

The board, the tokens, and the houses and hotels are, to my memory anyway, indistinguishable from the ones I used as a child.

Check out Monopoly-history.com for a wealth of information about the great variety of different editions over the years. I'll always have a soft spot for the old #11 deluxe edition, with the gray (not brown!) styrofoam deed holder and the gigantic red box.

The new kindergartner

Bear Mountain Lookout

Here's the view from atop Bear Mountain Lookout in the Black Hills. This is a composite of 11 photographs. I used Hugin to stitch them together. Click the photo to see a slightly bigger version.

Kristopher clued me in on Hugin. He has some nice panoramas on his blog. I like this one of the HHH Metrodome.

UPDATE: I replaced the photo with a bigger one. Click on it to see.

Also, some notes on how I made this: I didn't use a tripod. I was fairly careful to keep the horizon straight as I turned and took each photo. I was on manual exposure to avoid differences between the sections of the final result. I was not on manual white balance, though I probably should have been. In this case, it didn't seem to matter much. I took many more photos than would be strictly necessary -- I think about double. That probably made for better results. Another thing I wish I'd done -- take the photos in portrait mode rather than landscape. I could have included more on both the top & bottom of the photo.

I found Hugin very easy to use. I had previously tried version 0.6; the current 0.7 gave me much better results, and is easier to use. It has weird display problem: when selecting control points (this is where you tell the program where the same point, e.g. the tip of a tree, is on two adjacent photos), it would sometimes obscure part of the screen with a partial copy of the photo. I worked around it by just knowing where the hidden "add" button was, and clicking there. I don't know if this is a Mac OS X-specific problem.

I didn't read any of the documentation or look at any examples. I was clicking away ignorantly the whole time, and it still gave me pretty good results. If you look very closely, you can find a spot or two where the stitching doesn't quite match up. I went back and added a few more control points in one case, which made it better but certainly not perfect.

Bottom line: Try it! It's really fun. You might want something faster than an old memory-starved iMac G4, though.

Remedial Math

To my four readers: you know me -- I don't write about politics, government, issues, that sort of thing. This morning's Sioux Falls Argus Leader had an opinion piece that was so astonishingly bad that I couldn't resist. I like an easy target as much as the next guy.

The entire South Dakota congressional delegation, all three of them, combined their talents to write in support of ethanol. No big surprise -- lots of corn farmers around here, and lots of ethanol plants. OK, fine. You're just pandering to the voters representing your constituents. But get the arithmetic right, will you?

Let's go over this.

Francisco Blanch, a Merrill Lynch analyst, estimated that the use of renewable biofuels keeps gasoline prices 15 percent below what they might be. With today's gas prices, that means a $.52 per gallon increase from $3.50 for gasoline today to $4.02.

So that means $3.50 is 15% less than $4.02, right? Wrong. It's about 12.9% less. Maybe they meant to say prices would be 15% above what they are now if not for ethanol, or maybe the Merrill Lynch analyst meant to say that. Either way, somebody got it wrong.

Iowa State University recently confirmed Blanch's estimations with a study that showed ethanol has reduced gasoline prices from $.29 to $.40 per gallon.

So, a $0.29 to $0.40 estimate "confirmed" a $0.52 estimate. Got it.

Today, the United States imports about 12 percent (16.9 billion gallons) of the total refined gasoline consumed nationwide. When all ethanol facilities currently under construction are completed, the United States will have approximately 13 billion gallons of ethanol capacity. This will displace 77 percent of the total amount of gasoline imported into the United States each year.

13 billion is in fact 77% of 16.9 billion. Hey! They got one right? Alas, no. The increase from today's 8.5 billion gallons to tomorrow's 13 billion is only 4.5 billion, which is only about 27%. Furthermore, this assumes that ethanol has the same energy density per gallon as gasoline. It is much lower. In other words, it takes more than a gallon of ethanol to replace a gallon of gasoline.

Still, the renewable fuels industry is in its infancy, and we can do more. United States farmers produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn in 2007, averaging 151.1 bushels per acre. USDA estimates that we will produce 178 bushels per acre by 2015. Additionally, many experts predict that we will produce 300 bushels per acre by 2030. If these projections are accurate, the United States will be able to produce 60 billion gallons of ethanol from corn in 2030 without diverting corn from other uses and without expanding planted acreage in the United States. Moreover, this projection does not take into account increased efficiencies that will be realized through new technologies.

So what does it take into account? Magic? How do we nearly double our corn production per acre without increased efficiencies through new technologies? Maybe they're talking about increased efficiencies in the ethanol conversion process. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Importantly, worldwide corn production increased by 2.7 billion bushels from 2006 to 2007, and during this period ethanol demand for corn increased by 600 million bushels - 2 percent of the total.

Maybe 2% of the total, but 22% of the increase. I guess this one falls under Disraeli's third category of lies.

Today, distillers grains are $66 per ton cheaper than feeding with corn. With corn at $5.56 per bushel, cattle feeders would pay $268 per ton of total digestible nutrients for corn while only paying $201 per ton of TDN for distillers grains.

$268 - $201 = $67. Or $66. Whatever.

The results are clear. Without ethanol, consumers would be paying more for gas at the pump and more for food at the store.

We'd be paying more for food without ethanol? Seems like I read somewhere that the opposite was true. Now where was that? Oh, right here -- you said it, just a few paragraphs ago:

[T]he White House recently has stated that "production of corn-based biofuels is estimated to account for only three percent of the 43 percent increase in global food prices."

Is our delegation in Washington really this bad at math, or do they just think we are?

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We now return to our regularly scheduled program of self-indulgent cat photos.

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UPDATE: The Guardian reports that a World Bank study shows that the increase in food prices due to biofuels isn't 3% like the White House says, but a whopping 75%. Yikes!