Koch & Co. Pipe Organs, LLC

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Koch & Co. Pipe Organs, LLC

Pipe organ building, tuning, repair and restoration

10/01/2026

Join us tomorrow at 7:00 at St. Joseph Church in Dayton for a fantastic concert featuring organist Paul Fey!

09/29/2026

All of the new pipe trays have been constructed for our restoration work at Westminster Presbyterian. We make two sizes 8’ long and 6’ long to accommodate the larger and smaller ranks respectively.

09/24/2026

Can your organ do this? On many instruments the crescendo pedal blindly brings on stops and couplers allowing the organ to quickly increase or decrease registrations. In centuries past, physical hardware limitations made it extremely difficult if not impossible to make the crescendo pedal actually toggle the stop k***s to see what is happening as you are playing. The control system we used made it possible to toggle on/off the stops so that the organist can see what is being added to their registration. The video below was taken while we test this cool feature.

Edit: Since every control system is different, I would like to further specify that the video was taken during the normal operation of the crescendo. There is no need to activate a “blind” switch to make the console do this.

09/10/2026

Please join us for the dedication recital of our Opus 4 at St. Joseph Catholic Church on Friday, October 2nd at 7:00pm. Paul Fey will be the organist. The concert is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!

09/03/2026

In addition to our regularly scheduled work, over the past few weeks we have been moving our shop to a new facility (~10 minutes from our old shop) that will improve our efficiency and better accommodate our current and upcoming projects. This week, electricians upgraded some of the lighting and ran new circuits for all of our machinery. One of the projects for this week was repairing and re-regulating a manual stack.

08/28/2026

Our restoration work is moving right along! After several weeks of hard work, all the pouchboards, primaries, schwimmer regulators, and other pneumatics slated for restoration have been removed from the organ at Westminster Presbyterian. All of the pneumatic pouches and valves have been measured so that materials can be ordered. The next step is constructing nearly 50 pipe trays to accommodate the pipework that needs to be removed for cleaning, repair, and corrective voicing.

08/22/2026

We are at 199 followers! Who will be the 200th?
Thank you all for your continued support of our work!

08/20/2026

The photos below show some of the dozens of pouchboards and thousands of leather pneumatic valves that need to be restored at Westminster Presbyterian Church. The individual pneumatics are located under each pipe and deflate when the organist selects a stop and plays a note. Over the course of 40-50 years the leather begins to disintegrate leading to ciphers and dead notes. Once the leather membranes and components are replaced the organ will function like new and provide many more years of reliable service.

08/19/2026

Over the past few months, we’ve shared several posts about our work at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, but we never published the official project announcement. We are extremely excited and honored to have been selected to restore their magnificent 1962 Casavant organ — at over 118 ranks, it’s the largest church organ in the state of Ohio!

Our restoration work includes comprehensive releathering, pipe cleaning and repair, tonal finishing, and improvements to access for tuning and maintenance, among a long list of other restoration tasks that will take place over the next year. We look forward to sharing photos and descriptions of our progress throughout the project, and are most grateful to the church for the opportunity to restore this landmark instrument.

The images below show the original hand-drawn renderings for the organ, included in the set of blueprints for the instrument. Please excuse the minor distortion in the images as the extremely large drawings have been folded since installation and we did not have access to a flatbed scanner at the time we reviewed the drawings.

07/30/2026

The new regulator installed at Westminster Presbyterian now has wind. If you recall from one of our previous posts, there was once a massive 2’ square by 6’ long wooden manifold once installed in this area with many PVC lines running off it. We removed all of that, fabricated and soldered a new static wind-line (shown in black), and installed a new regulator to greatly streamline the wind system for the few ranks this goes to. This freed up some space in the chamber, improved access, and reduced air leaks.

Address

Dayton, OH
45402

Website

http://www.kochpipeorgans.com/

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