In response to Steven Kent Goodman,  The pump shown in the Reproduco on
p. 252 appears to be the typical combination pump used by Operators in
the SO and other late generation pianos with pipes.  You're right --
that pump doesn't put out enough volume of air to handle the bass pipes
and beater-type tremolo (which lets air escape as it works).

The machine in "Treasures" does have a tremolo, shown in the lower
right corner under the keyboard.  Either it was made up for the photo
shoot, or they put the front cover on the pump to muffle the flap valve
noise because some Reproducos made for the smallest mortuaries were
voiced _extremely_ softly.

I once owned one in which the bottom of the case was lined with
insulating board, and the bass strings seemed to have been packed with
graphite to make them dead.  This was unbelievable to me at the time,
but it had lived in a dry climate all of its life and the other metal
parts were as shiny as new.

The bass strings gave off their graphite when I laid them in a pan of
alcohol, and they came out in shiny new condition, with no hint of
corrosion.  Without any polishing or mechanical cleaning of any kind,
the copper looked like new, we reinstalled the strings and they sounded
quite good.  In that instrument, the vacuum pump was in the blower box,
remote from the piano.

Operators also built the "Midget Auto Organ" (shown at the lower
right hand corner of Bowers' Encyclopedia p. 545), containing piano,
mandolin, flute and "stop diapason," (the upper octave of stopped bass
pipes which are installed inside the ordinary Reproduco cabinet).
Pressure in this organ might have been supplied by a pump instead of
a blower, but it didn't have bass pipes, tremolo or quintadena.

Art Reblitz
seeburg@juno.com