Why am I DOING THIS??!!

I woke up  early this morning, and just laid in bed. The dog had appeared at some time during the night, and as par for the course, she decides that I am intruding upon HER bed space. That means, she has the most territory, while I am confined to Rhode Island.
I look at all the parts and pipes and wiring, and I wonder just why am I doing this? This is insane! I have no experience in restoring a theatre organ! Run away while I still can!
Bah!
There is something in my make-up that just can't resist mechanical gadgets. Mechanical MUSICAL gadgets makes it even more appealing.
For a number of years I have worked on pianos. The tuning side of piano work was not my initial interest, it was the mechanism- the action! All the parts! And the piano case itself, what with the chunk of cast iron, all the strings, the sounding board. All of that interested me, especially the prospect of taking something that was in bad shape and returning it to its original condition. Or close to it.
It wasn't long before I gravitated to player pianos.
My grandmother-on my father's side- had an old "Meister" brand upright player piano, and when she died, the piano came to our house. It was a BIG thing, and heavy! ( Why is it that everything that interests me is big and heavy?)My father had decided that we would try to get the player working again, and he acquired some small diameter tubing to replace broken pieces.
Dad didn't live much longer. His heart was not good, and I can remember as a child seeing a bottle of nitro glycerin up on a shelf in the kitchen, and wondering why we had explosives in our house! My father's adoptive mother died in September of 1972, and my dad just cried and cried. She had been in a private nursing home over on Pine Street for a year or so, and had had a series of strokes. Dad was tremendously devastated by the loss, and he was also plagued by his inability to discover who his real parents were. He had been consumed for a while trying to find out his birth family, and his adoptive mother-whom he loved dearly- was not any help. Now with her being gone, the task seemed more daunting.
The stress of the loss, his inability to find his birth parents and work just overwhelmed him, and he wound up dying just 2 months later- December 6, 1972.
Enough of that.
Off and on, I would try to make the player work. I would attach the hose from the vacuum cleaner to the player system, and would reverse the flow so it would produce pressure, i.e., blow air. Nothing. In all the times of tinkering with the old thing I could never get the player system to do a thing. It just sat there, defiant.
When I was reaching the point of high school graduation, my mother offered to buy me a NEW piano, and so we traded the piano in at Heard Music Co., and got the piano I still have today- a Baldwin spinet. (It still serves me well, and has seen a lot of use!)
Years later, when faced with the prospect of acquiring an old player piano, I jumped at it, remembering my grandmother's old piano.
This time, I found  BOOK that was devoted to restoring player pianos, and with a little time and investment in supplies, I did it!
And it was at this time that I discovered my fatal flaw concerning my grandmother's piano. I had tried so hard to get hers to work by blowing air in through the inlets for the action.
I had no idea, until this point, that the system operated off of SUCTION, not PRESSURE. RATS.
To this day, I wish I had my grandmother's old player piano, 'cause now I could fix it!
Through the years I have done a number of old players, each with different player actions. Amphion, Gulbransen, H.C. Bay, Kimball, Baldwin, Standard, Aeolian, Starr, Steck, Jacob Doll,Wurlitzer,Straube, and a couple of others that I could not identify. They were always fun, challenging and rewarding.
The restoration techniques took me into the realm of reed organs. Those are neat, and in comparison to a player piano's action, very simple. I still do reed organs, and wish I had one of my own.
Then, not satisfied with what I had done, I built a replica of a Wurlitzer 105 Band Organ. A band organ is kind of like a hybrid between a player piano and an organ. Half of the instrument operates off of suction, the other half from pressure. It operates off of a music roll, and the roll activates little fingers to push down on the organ "keys" . It is this part that operates off of suction.
When the keys are pushed down, air pressure is admitted to a corresponding pipe, or pipes, and music is heard. There are 97 pipes inside the organ, broken down into cello, violin, piccolo, flageolet, trumpet and flute. Much like a pipe organ, you can control how many ranks of pipes you want to play. The instrument also has a snare drum and a bass drum, both played off the music roll.
All of this building and restoring gave me the confidence to face this new challenge.
Except for the wiring, there is nothing involved in the restoration that is a puzzler or really beyond what I have already experienced. Well, okay...the metal pipes...I have zero experience with them, but  hey! You gotta start somewhere.
I am facing this project with high hopes! I know what it is supposed to do. I know what it is going to sound like.
ONWARD!!!!!