<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">I'm thinking of building a vastly simplified tonewheel organ. What I'm looking at doing is a fan motor running off of wall-current with a dimmer (the kind used on house lights) to vary the speed of the motor (overall pitch), this motor being connected to a shaft with 5 (or howeverman) wheels. My questions are as follows:<BR>
1) Will the fan assembly work? I know some fans don't 'like' lower currents than they're used to seeing, what sort are these?<BR>
2) Anything I should know about these dimmers beforehand?<BR>
3) How many wheels is it reasonable to have on the shaft? (As I said, I'm thinking five, but could be swayed in either direction).<BR>
4) It's mainly for drones, so a dimmer as pitch control isn't a problem and no EG's shouldn't be a problem, but what about output level? What should the line-out level be? And howsabout a 'to modular out' level?<BR>
5) What's the cheapest sort of inductors to use? I don't like the sound of guitar pickups, they end up as a little more expensive than I'd like to use. I would like to have separate ones for each wheel so I can use pots as 'drawbars'.<BR>
6) Unrelated, but I have a keyboard labeled GC-7A. It has no maker label on it, and basically outputs a square wave with pitch determined by key being pressed. Ugly sound. It has two 'timbre' controls that change the sound - one seems to add tremolo, the other something I can't quite identify. It has an output labeled 'karaoke' but no line out, which shares some solder with the 9v in (I run it from batteries). I'm thinking I may circuitbend it, but I can find no info whatsoever on it. Anyone have any clue? Oh, and it plays a wide selection of obnoxious Christmas melodies.<BR>
(I got it for 2.50 USD from the thrift store. Maybe if I didn't blow all my money on crap like that I could afford the 100 dollar organ they have, unlabeled maker but it has enough stops that it looks like fun).<BR>
Any help much appreciated.<BR>
-eric</FONT></HTML>