The Sanfilippo Wurlitzer 180 Band Organ (#3439) has duplex spoolboxes,
both playing style 180 music rolls, plus a MIDI control system.  It
was originally sold to Puritas Springs Park in West Park, Ohio, near
Cleveland.  Bowers' Encyclopedia lists it as going to West Park,
Colorado, a place that never existed.  Certain entries in the original
factory ledgers are very difficult to read.

The Bovey Restoration example (#4182) in the Music Hall in Nevada City,
Montana, originally played Caliola or APP rolls.  It was originally
sold to Spillman Engineering.  It has been missing the piccolo division,
three melody ranks, the cellos in the trombone division, most of the
accompaniment division, and some of the trumpets and trombones ever
since it was acquired by Charlie Bovey, although it has a long row of
bass clarinets of unknown origin mounted in front.  In the 1970s, when
I worked for the Boveys, I retubed it to play Style 165 rolls thinking
it might sound better since they require fewer of the missing notes,
but it didn't help.

The last time I saw it, the original blower motor had burned out and
had been replaced by a modern motor of the same horsepower rating,
connected to the original blower shaft with belts and pulleys.  With
friction loss in the belt drive, a modern motor less powerful than the
original, and major leakage, there was no longer enough pressure or
volume to inflate the reservoir more than a little.  After the terrible
videos appeared on YouTube several years ago, it was put out of order
until repairs can be made by the current technician.

The Bies-Boehck example (#4275) was originally sold to a buyer in
Waukegan, Illinois.  It contains two spoolboxes playing Caliola or
APP rolls, and a MIDI system.  It is quite different from Sanfilippo's
#3439.

My rationale for saying the theatre organ department had nothing to
do with the design of the 180 is that the pipework, wind chest, and
percussion actions are unlike anything found in any Wurlitzer pipe
organ.  On the other hand, the player mechanism, including automatic
registers, the register control unit, unit valve stack, spoolboxes,
and duplex coupler for the two rolls, are almost identical to those
of a 165 but expanded in musical scale and width.  Only the pressure
regulator and Spencer blower in the 180 are similar to those commonly
used in small theatre organs.  The Bovey example once went back to the
factory where it was fitted with a keyboard for use in a church!

I've always believed that any real musicians involved in Wurlitzer's
organ department would have designed something with a better scale.
I first heard the negative comments about the 180 being designed by the
theatre organ department many years ago from someone who didn't like
theatre organs and who wanted to make the theatre organ designers look
bad for the drawbacks in the octave-switching couplers in the original
180 design.

Pipe organs commonly have couplers, but they serve an entirely
different musical purpose from those in the 180.  Pipe organ couplers
generally couple one manual to another, or one rank of pipes to a
different manual or the pedalboard, to make the organ more versatile
for the organist.  In the 180 they simply switch the lower or higher
notes of the piccolos, clarinets, and trumpets to the smaller number
of tracker bar holes assigned to each of those divisions, because the
roll would otherwise be too wide to work.  This made the organ less
versatile for the roll arrangers.

If the theatre organ department had anything to do with one of these
organs, it might have been in the addition of the keyboard on #4182,
although the action, including the keyboard, was still entirely
pneumatic.  Wurlitzer pipe organs always had electro-pneumatic actions.
According to Charlie Bovey, the drums were missing and Ozzie Wurdeman
added an electro-pneumatic bass drum action from a theatre organ.

The 180 did the job for which the Wurlitzer company designed it:
to provide very loud, powerful outdoor music in the setting of an
amusement park.  Today, with the addition of MIDI control circumventing
the piccolo and clarinet couplers in #3439, and all three couplers in
#4275, they have the additional capability of playing exciting band
music closer to the way a real band plays it than any other American
band organ -- fully chromatic, and capable of playing numerous different
musical lines simultaneously when called for by the arranger.

Art Reblitz
http://www.reblitzrestorations.com/