Tuning & maintenance
8′Two visits a year, tuned at 18°C with the heating set as you would have it on a Sunday. Every pipe we touch is logged, and you get the log.
From £340 a visit
Organ builders · Stroud · since 1897
Every pipe we make will outlive us.
Windchest builds, restores, tunes and voices pipe organs for churches, chapels and concert halls across the west of England. Four people, one workshop on Bridge Street, and a waiting list we are honest about.
The stop list
Six things you can draw on us for
Pitch marks are how organ builders label a rank — 8′ speaks at the note you played, 4′ an octave above. We use them here for the same reason: they tell you which register of the work you are looking at.
Voicing & regulation
4′Nicking, languid height, toe openings. The slow work that decides whether an instrument sounds like a building or like a machine standing in one.
From £2,400 a division
Restoration
16′Historic instruments returned to their maker's intention — and a written record of every place we chose to depart from it, and why.
Quoted per instrument
New instruments
2⅔′Mechanical action, quarter-sawn oak cases, spotted metal cast on our own sand bench. Two to four years from drawings to the first Sunday.
From £180,000
Condition surveys
1′Twenty to thirty pages, photographed, costed and ranked by urgency. Written so your insurer and your faculty committee can both act on it.
£1,150 fixed
Climate & humidity
2′A cracked chest is a heating problem before it is a joinery problem. We log the room for a season, then tell you what to change.
From £480
The workshop
A trade you cannot rush and should not
Josiah Perrin took the lease on 14 Bridge Street in 1897 to build one organ for the Congregational chapel two doors down. It is still there, still on its original mechanism, and we still tune it.
Nothing about the method has changed much since. We cast our own spotted metal, we cut mitres by hand, and we voice in the room the instrument will live in, because a pipe that is right on the bench is only a guess.
1897Workshop founded on Bridge Street
104Instruments on our tuning round
12,400Pipes voiced since 2016
4People, and that is the plan
Recently completed
St Aldhelm's, Malmesbury — rebuilt 2024
| Stop | Pitch | Pipes |
|---|---|---|
| Great | ||
| Open Diapason | 8′ | 58 |
| Stopped Diapason | 8′ | 58 |
| Principal | 4′ | 58 |
| Twelfth | 2⅔′ | 58 |
| Fifteenth | 2′ | 58 |
| Mixture III | 19.22.26 | 174 |
| Swell | ||
| Salicional | 8′ | 58 |
| Voix Céleste (from G) | 8′ | 46 |
| Gemshorn | 4′ | 58 |
| Oboe | 8′ | 58 |
| Pedal | ||
| Bourdon | 16′ | 30 |
| Bass Flute | 8′ | 30 |
| Twelve stops | 744 pipes | |
From the bench
Three stages of the same instrument
What they said afterwards
Three organists, unprompted
They found a split in the pallet box that three previous firms had quietly tuned around for eleven years.Revd Alice Crossley · St Aldhelm's, Malmesbury
Marged spent an entire day on the Oboe alone. You can hear it from the back of the nave now, and you could not before.Dr Peter Hollins · Director of Music, Cirencester
The quotation was the most detailed document our fabric committee has ever been sent. Not one figure on it changed.Hilary Duffy · Churchwarden, Painswick
Tell us what it is doing, and when.
A cipher on a cold morning, a note that has gone dead, a smell of dust when the blower starts — all of it is useful. Ivo covers Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and the Marches most weeks.
Arrange a survey