[HAM] M3 with no sound?

[Doug Brydges]

Yes, Yes, Yes - the best advice is... be patient!! Let time help the oil do its job. The outcome will be positive - unless of course there are some really badly worn bushings in the TWG.

When I first came across my M3 For Sale ad a couple of months back, I started off with a phone call (long distance) and learned that the 'little old lady' owner that the spinet stopped making sound sometime in the mid-70s. I then looked for info on Hammond M3s and TWGs on the net. Once I learned that most Hammonds stop working because of a lack of TWG oil, I took a gamble and offered the old lady $250 Canadian, betting it was really a hardly used organ that just needed oil.

Sure enough, when I got it home and off the trailer and pulled the TWG cover, it was so tight I could not turn it by hand. After ten days of soaking with the oil and hand turning 2 times a day (and start/run sequences) it finally ran free enough to spin on its own. AN extra shot of oil or two was needed to quieten a squealing bushing in the vibrato can (back of the run motor).

I took the original Hammond tubes out of the amp and down to my local TV-radio repair shop. He popped them into his old tube tester and found them all to be working as good as new. Though he had replacements in stock for them all, he suggested I could get several more years out of the originals yet!

My next venture will be to add a recently acquired foldback kit.

THanks to all who have provided the good tech advice here - it really has been helpful to me.

Doug Brydges (keyrocks)
>
> From: <dd.davis at mindspring.com>
> Date: 2003/06/07 Sat AM 02:57:15 EST
> To: <hammond at zeni.net>
> Subject: Re: [HAM] M3 with no sound?
>
> O.K.,
>
> I got my M3 home from Goodwill today....So I actually got a chance to dig
> into it.     What I found was that the TWG was indeed frozen.  I was able to
> free it by slightly rotating it, then oiling, then rotating, etc.
>
> Now it actually spins up when I hold up the 'start' switch.  It still seems
> to be spinning with some resistance but with the amount of
> sympathetic/driven shafts that it has to turn, I guess it would have some
> resistance?