Progress update: Cataloging the documents
Our primary goal for the documents is digitizing them. From that perspective, there are two kinds of documents:
Documents that are easy to digitize
Documents that are hard to digitize
Documents that are easy to digitize include any document that fits in our scanner. Our scanner has a max size of 12×17”, so any individual document which is smaller than that is easy to digitize.
Documents that are hard to digitize are larger than 12×17”.
For easy documents, you put them in the scanner and press a button. A few seconds later, you get a digital file. (There’s a few other steps, but you get the idea.)
For hard documents, we need a different process, and we haven’t decided exactly what that process will be. Some options include buying a bigger scanner, shipping the documents to a scanning company, or creating a DIY setup using a vacuum table and a ceiling-mounted camera.
So, the two types of documents require two completely different workflows. The workflow for the easy documents is cheaper and more flexible. It doesn’t cost us anything except time to scan easy documents, and we can do it whenever we want. But each option for digitizing the hard documents requires some sort of upfront expense, and the process is more complex.
For that reason, we decided to focus on the easy documents.
However, as we’ve started to scan the easy documents, we’ve encountered a couple of problems.
Problem 1: We are storing dozens of boxes with no clue what is inside of them.
Before we started scanning, we had no idea what was inside any box. However, scanning the documents has changed our perception of the collection.
When the Wurlitzer Co. was manufacturing musical instruments, every drawing was a functional object. The people who worked in the factory used the drawings as a reference to help them successfully complete their jobs making musical instruments.
So, if you are a worker inside the Wurlitzer factory during the years 1948–1984, the drawings mean one thing. But, if you are reading this website in the year 2026, the drawings mean something else.
In the year 2026, the organs are gone. The vendors are gone. The people who drew the papers and signed the papers are gone. A lot of the technology is gone, and the part that isn’t gone has been transformed beyond recognition. The desire for organs as a high-demand consumer item is long gone. All we have now is the paper.
Even in 2026, the drawings have a lot of practical use. They can be consulted when restoring vintage organs. As historical documents, they can provide a lot of background info on the Wurlitzer Co., which can be used to assist keyboard restorations in a general way. However, because so many things have changed between 1984 and 2026, there are a lot of subtleties in the documents that a casual viewer will miss on first inspection.
When you spend enough time with the documents, the gap between now and then starts to close for you. You forget that home organs are a “haha, so cheesy!!” thing that people pick up on Facebook marketplace cuz they were in a quirky mood that day. You understand that the organ is a serious instrument for people to play and enjoy as actual unironic artistic expression. You understand that teams of people designed that instrument to facilitate their customers’ expression and enjoyment. You see how the drawings document that design in meticulous detail so that the people in the factory could make those organs again and again.
If you spend even 10 minutes with the drawings, one of the first things you notice is that Wurlitzer made so many different kinds of organs. The cynical explanation is that Wurlitzer was overproducing organs in a bid to extract every possible bit of profit from the largest customer base possible. To do this, they made organs for professionals, for amateurs, for dilettantes, for kids, for people who didn’t believe they would ever learn to play with both hands simultaneously, for people who wanted their organs to occasionally sound like guitars, and so on. This behemoth corporation wanted to enrich themselves by making organs for everyone. Organs for everyone! Can you imagine a world where everyone has an organ!!
And so, when you start to look at more and more papers, the organs seem less like an undifferentiated group of obsolete instruments. The appearance of the blueprints change over the years, and so does the technology. Various features jump out. You start to recognize organ models and the types of parts that they contain. Certain parts that seem simple actually have pages upon pages of supplemental documentation. Often, these parts are part of a larger assembly. Where are the drawings for that assembly? In another box, maybe.
Or, one box will have fifteen sequential part numbers, all from the same organ, but the blueprints underneath will be for a completely different organ manufactured in a completely different decade in a completely different factory. Where are the rest of the drawings for the first organ? In another box. Who knows which one.
Or, often, a drawing will reference another drawing. Do we have the other drawing? Maybe. If we do have it, where would we find it? In one of the dozens of uncatalogued boxes.
Theoretically, we will scan every page in every box, and all this uncertainty will disappear. However, the split between easy drawings and hard drawings complicates this. The easy drawings will be scanned relatively soon, but the hard drawings won’t be scanned until the indefinite future. And, until then, we will continue to have boxes upon boxes whose contents are completely unknown.
Problem 2: The hard documents generally depict more useful drawings than the easy documents.
At Tropical Fish, we are extremely familiar with Wurlitzer electronic pianos, because we have been repairing them for over 10 years. We also have a general knowledge of vintage electronics, and we have sourced quite a few rare original parts and clever replacements. And although we don’t understand home organs at the same granular level of detail, we do understand how they work in general.
For us, the Wurlitzer documents are a gold mine of technical support for anyone who wants to repair a vintage Wurlitzer keyboard or organ. So, when we look at the parts depicted in the drawings, we try to consider what the part is for, and how difficult it would be to repair it. We ask: can this part be replaced with new components? If so, is it possible to obtain a 1:1 replacement, or would the replacement have differences that must be accounted for? If not, could the part be fabricated or replaced with something similar? And so on.
The easy drawings depict a lot of very important and useful parts. Many small parts are more critical than they seem. Screws, for instance, seem really straightforward—until you lose one. In many cases, if you don’t use exactly the correct replacement, you can seriously compromise the strength of its hold. Knowing the specs of the screw is the difference between an hours-long research project and a 30-second google.
There are also a few small electronic components that are very difficult to replace. One component that we were very happy to find in the collection was 650444, which is the varistor that powers the tremolo in the Wurlitzer 140. Today, varistors are mostly used for surge protection, so it is very difficult to find a varistor with the specs that a 140 or 140A amp requires. Having a drawing with so much detail makes sourcing a replacement a lot easier.
However, most of the electronic components depicted in the smaller drawings are passive components that are fairly straightforward to spec. The smaller drawings do have a lot of historical detail, including revision dates and engineering comments. These things are certainly worth studying, and you will be a better tech and more informed musician if you do so. But these are not the kind of parts that turn the instrument into a doorstop if they happen to fail.
However, as we explored the document collection, we realized that the most valuable information is often located on the biggest drawings. This makes sense because it does require more space to depict all of the details for the more complex parts and assemblies. However, even some small parts have big drawings. Transistors, for instance, are pretty tiny, but their drawings include so much information that they are usually presented on 17×22” paper that does not fit on our scanner.
One of the reasons why we are digitizing the archive is because we want people to realize that Wurlitzer organs are cool and highly usable instruments. We hope that, one day, organs will be worth more than their scrap value, so they can continue to be enjoyed by people in the future. Otherwise, they will all be disassembled for parts, and there won’t be any organs left for anyone to play.
For that reason, it is important to us that people have access to the best and most useful drawings in the collection—sooner rather than later. Vintage organs are not ephemera. They are highly-engineered machines that can be repaired, maintained, and enjoyed for decades to come.
The solution: Our catalog of large drawings
Scans are the best way to preserve the information in the drawings. The next best thing, however, is simply knowing what information may be available. To that end, we have paused our scanning operation in order to catalogue all of the large drawings in the collection.
We currently have all of the drawings stored in bankers’ boxes. For the purposes of scanning, we have been separating the smaller easy drawings from the larger hard-to-scan drawings, and keeping them in different boxes. Now, for each box of large drawings, we are creating a list of each drawing in the box and the most important information in the drawing:
The part number
The title of the drawing
The model of instrument that the part belongs to
The date that the drawing was created
The factory that the drawing was created for
This way, if someone requests a drawing, we can do an initial search to see whether we have that drawing or drawings that may be similar. We can also explore the cost of sending certain useful oversized drawings to a digitization service.
Although the catalog isn’t complete yet, we have already used it to locate certain drawings by part number and title. There are a lot of drawings in a collection, and a lot of them contain useful info! We’d like to make the catalog accessible to more people, and to that end we’re creating a member portal where interested people can view the list.
So, although we haven’t uploaded any scans for the past several weeks, we’ve been working hard on our catalog of oversized drawings. So far, we have nine boxes catalogued, and each box contains between 200 and 500 drawings. The oversized drawings range from 22×17” to around 34×44”—which is well over 1/2” thick when folded down to 8.5×11”). So, there is a lot of variation on how many drawings can fit in a single bankers’ box.
If you’d like to support the digitization and cataloguing of the Wurlitzer document archive, please consider donating.