[sdiy] Tonewheel questions

[Robotboy8 at aol.com]

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:
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?
2) Anything I should know about these dimmers beforehand?
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).
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?
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'.
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.
(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).
Any help much appreciated.
       -eric
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