organ leslie for guitar

[marcrochotte]

i tore apart an old wurlitzer organ and took the leslie out. i wanna use it with my guitar. i can tell how to wire up the speaker, but i dont know how i would wire up the on/off and slow/fast switches. any help would be appreciated. thanks! i have attached the schematic that is on the cabinet

[Don Moose]

Need the relay coil voltages - can you spot mfr and model numbers on them?

[marcrochotte]

i dont know which of these numbers you want, so heres a picture..

[Enzo]

Those are the motors. The relays are different items. IS there a metal control box of some sort that those motors connect to? I would put up a picture of a relay, but there are so many shapes and sizes it would be pointless to select one.

If you have a control box, that is where the relays would be along with the triacs in the schematic. If all you have is the motor assembly and the spinning baffle, then you will need to build a control box.

[marcrochotte]

yes there is a meatal control box, i have the whole leslie sectiion, it was connected with 5 wires to a different area, i just dont know how to wire it to switch it on and off and to change the speed.. there are 2 wires for the speaker and three other wires..and there is also an ac cord..

[Enzo]

That fits your schematic. Would the three non-speaker wires be orange, white, and violet, by any chance?

Can we get a picture inside the control box? Specifically the two relays - the things with the wire colors I mentioned going to them.

[marcrochotte]

yes they are those colors, the relays dont have any numbers or anything written on them..

[Enzo]

Ah. Looks like reed relays, which is fine, since they are only controlling triac gates - very small currents.

The relays run on separate power from the rest of it. You plug the box into the wall, then energizing one relay or the other - not both at once please - turns on one of the motors.

The orange wire is common to the relays and would be your ground. Violet is the slow motor and the white wire the fast.

I don;t know what voltage the relays need, but I'd guess 5v or 12v. DC voltage though.

Make up a small DC supply, ground to the orange wire, then apply the + voltage to the violet or the white wire. That shoulod turn on the relay. And that should turn 0on the motor it controls.

For experimenting, I bet even a 9V battery would work.

Is that relay in the foreground burnt up or is that just some brown stuff dripped on it?

[marcrochotte]

just something that dripped on it i think..it still worked fine when the organ was on..thanks a lot for the help!

[spsimmons]

I've got one of these leslies and need to turn it into a extention cabinet. I don't really understand how to power the motors and relays.

My limited understanding is that I need to run regular 120V (fused?) to the motor and somehow use that power to feed a transformer for the relays.

But... I also want to be able to switch the speed and motors on and off from a footswitch. If I don't want 120V running through my footswitch (I don't.), then I'll need to add another relay for the on/off, right?

So, I don't know what kind of power the relays need.

Here's what I'm working with.

[spsimmons]

I've worked on a wiring diagram/schematic for this, but feel a little hesitant to post it. It might be so off base as to be humorous. It would surely showcase my lack of understanding of basic electronics. Does anybody who's done this conversion have a schematic I can cheat off of.

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize how blurry those relay photos were. The relay box has the numbers 64-901 and 533 on it along with a schematic. The resistors are 65ohm, and those large yellow components (capacitors maybe ?) are marked 400 DC, 416P.

[flythair1]

I did a leslie conversion from an organ into a stand-alone cabinet and I used an on-off-on switch for the low or high speed motors to be turned on or off. I used a jack plate with the switch, IEC socket and input jack. I put a cap on the speaker lead to limit the bass. I use this effect with a low power amp as the speaker is a 6"X9" oval CTS that actually revolves in the mechanism. It is a little different from the sound deflector style in the previous pic.
This would be a very nice guitar effect for the studio, I've never tried to mike it for live use.
It measures about 13" square and 24" high.

Scott

[Alf]

A revolving speaker ? Very interesting !

How did you accomplish this ? How do you apply the power to the speaker, gliding contacts ?

[Mark Hammer]

Ah, the famous "cheese wheel" Vibratone!!

I've been a proud owner of two since 1979.

Ignore all that relay crap. Basically, there are two AC motors, each having two leads. Since they are AC, it doesn't really matter which lead is which. I have them wired up like this:

** One lead from each motor are soldered together and connected to one lead from the power cord that goes to the wall.
** The remaining lead from each motor is wired to an outside lug of a SPDT stompswitch.
** The remaining lead from the power cord goes to the common of the stompswitch.

So, basically, you are routing AC power to the one motor or the other. Simple as that.

As a one-rotor system, the effect is not as rich as a dual-rotor cab, but it is still one helluva lot richer than a chorus pedal or flanger, simply because of the spatial element, and because the rotating speaker is essentially a kind of "post-production effect" superimposed on top of what comes out of the amp and speaker.

For convenience reasons, the rotors are mounted vertically in home organs. However, the effect is more pronounced, in some respects, if they are mounted horizontally, such that it spins towards and away from you. Note that the speaker is probably limited to about 20W input, if that.

[flythair1]

The speaker terminals are connected to either end of the shaft that the speaker & housing spin on. There is a set of contacts on each end that are spring loaded and the shaft does not have continuity thru itself. I've seen many styles of leslies with this kind of setup, except the real Leslies are mainly a deflector for the woofer and a spinning horn.
More wattage/volume is available if you use a 12" speaker into a spinning deflector. I have seen an Allen organ tone cab that had three 12"s and three tweeters all mounted on a spinning baffle. Quite the system. Good for a big church. It was about 3'X3'X5' high.
Scott