Reaction to your plan would depend on the size and name brand and
quality of the pipe organ as well as the wind pressure and pipe scales.

Buying a church organ so you can remove a very few pipes to put into
a band organ in my view could be like buying a classic Rolls Royce so
you could remove the hood ornament, the tail lights and the floor mats
to use on your Volkswagen and then crush the rest of the car.  Wouldn't
it be better to drive it?  Plus you can find other sources for floor
mats, tail lights and hood ornaments without crushing a fully
functional Rolls Royce car.

Of course you may not have a pipe organ that equates with a Rolls,
but indeed your pipe organ may be a Volkswagen.  A church organ rank
is 61 pipes or more.  A band organ does not use that many pipes and
some ranks are only a dozen or so pipes in number.  Also, you can
always hook up a spool frame playing your favorite band organ rolls
on any fully functional pipe organ.

There is another thing to take into consideration.  Organ pipes
come voiced for the instrument and even the room they were built for.
These can be voiced for 2 inches of wind or 20 inches.  The small
church organs would be voiced for single digit pressure but pipes made
for more theatrical sounds were voiced for 8, 10, 15 or 20 inches
pressure depending upon the size of the theater the sound would fill.

There is also scaling, that is, the width and depth or diameter and
its relation to pipe length to get the same pitch.  A wider scaled pipe
will usually have a larger sound than a smaller scaled one.  This
scaling gives the pipe its tone.  For example a string tone pipe is
always skinny and narrow scale compared to a large flute which will be
a wider scale.

This scaling of the pipes used in a band organ will change the size of
the pipe chest you will need simply because a wider scale pipe takes
more toeboard space.  The toeboard is the board with holes in it that
the pipes sit upon.  It is doubtful that you could use all those chests
in your band organ.  New smaller ones will be needed.

Remember, you can always purchase extra pipes from an organ builder who
replaces some ranks in every rebuild.  Also eBay has organ pipes almost
every day.

Right now I am building an orchestrion for a hobbyist who has lots of
extra organ pipes.  He had an incomplete rank of wooden flute d'amour
pipes that was out in the garage.  I took a couple of octaves of those
at the top end of the existing pipes.  I rescaled them by removing the
stoppers and cutting off the pipes (top end of the body) to get the
right pitch.  This changed the pitch to an octave up and a few notes
away from its stoppered pitch.

Cutting the pipe toe off for the right length for my new chest I am
building also removed the adjustable lead toe.  I will now have to
adjust the amount of wind for each pipe once I get them on the chest,
but these stoppered pipes -- which were way too long to fit in the
case and way too lady-like in their tone -- now are now shorter, open
wider-scale flutes that will do very well to be heard over the piano
and accordion in this tall case instrument.

So your answer to should you trash the whole pipe organ to build
something else is "Perhaps, perhaps not."  If the pipes are scaled
right and on the right pressure, and if your organ is not historic or
big enough or fabulous enough to keep as it is, then take a few ranks
and get busy.  If you have an historic Jardine, Hutchings, or Aeolian
Skinner then keep the organ as it is.  If you have a small 3-4 rank
organ you would possibly have something that would be okay as a band
organ if you can get the right scalings.

D.L. Bullock
www.dougbullock.ws