Reuter Console, Combination Action, and Control-System Modernization

Console building was in-house work at Reuter from the start. Frank Jost was hired as a console builder among the six employees who founded the firm in 1917, and a Kansas City PBS feature on organ building in Lawrence reports that the company made all of its components in house, keyboards included, with one craftsman building keyboards for fifty years.

What that produced on a given instrument is recorded for a few named organs. The Organ Historical Society Pipe Organ Database record for Opus 1900 of 1976 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lawrence, Kansas lists a three-manual console with 61-note manuals and a 32-note pedalboard, electrical key and stop action, drawknobs in horizontal rows on curved jambs, balanced expression shoes and adjustable combination pistons. Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh describes its Opus 2175 of 1994 as a four-manual instrument of 105 ranks whose 170 drawknobs on rosewood stems are color-coded by function, black for the Chancel division, red for the Gallery division and blue for mechanical controls, with bone naturals, rosewood sharps, tracker-touch keyboards and a maple and ebony pedalboard.

These are two instruments, not a house pattern, and the console on an instrument may not be the one it started with: the Opus 1900 console was replaced by a two-manual English-style console around 2009, and Reuter removed the original three-manual terraced console for possible onward sale, so a Reuter console found in one building can have begun life in another.

Before about 1930, Reuter switched stops and couplers through what the paper calls a trick relay: a small box containing rollers for the stops and couplers that operate against stationary contacts. The name is the paper’s, not a Reuter product name, and it belongs to this particular box rather than to any early relay.

From about 1930 Reuter built what the paper calls wiggle-wire consoles, in which long contact wires are moved by wooden strips carried on the stop tabs, with long crank contacts running transversely. The switching therefore lives in the console itself, and the stop tab does the moving; the term is the service literature’s description, not a Reuter model designation. The trick relay and the wiggle-wire console are two different mechanisms, not stages of one design, and a technician who names one of them is telling you which of the two is in front of them.

The boundary between the two generations is an approximation by era, not a date or an opus number, and it does not run the other way: a console type does not date an instrument. The paper places the change at about 1930 and gives the wiggle-wire practice no end date. Its other marker is equally undated: older Reuter consoles have hinged nameboards connected to pneumatic combination actions, with keyboards held under two large screws, whereas newer Reuter consoles have hinged keyboards. A pneumatic combination action is the sign of the older group, but the paper gives no year for that change either. Which generation a console belongs to is settled by qualified inspection of the console; the year of the instrument is settled from its records, and How to Identify and Date a Reuter Organ covers that question.

Reuter’s own history states that after 1945 the company pioneered diode relay technology, which it describes as the precursor of modern solid-state switching systems. That is the company’s account of itself, with no date, patent or instrument named, and the patent record does not carry it. A Google Patents search for patents assigned to Reuter Organ with priority before 1990 returns exactly one result, US Patent 2,083,644 for an organ action magnet, filed by Floro Albert on 6 July 1936 and granted to the Reuter Organ Company on 15 June 1937. That patent claims a bracket-mounted magnet and a knife-edge-pivoted armature carrying a valve on a wind-box, which is chest-side hardware, not a relay, a combination action or console control.

By comparison, the Austin Organ Company holds a documented series of combination and stop-action patents from 1912 to 1935, and M. P. Möller, Inc. holds a combination-action patent of 1937-38 alongside its chest-valve patents. The difference lies in the searched index rather than necessarily in history, since assignee indexing of early patents is incomplete, spellings vary, a patent can be assigned to an individual rather than the company, and a builder can protect a design by trade practice rather than by patent. The diode-relay claim therefore stands as the company’s attributed self-description, which the patent record neither supports nor contradicts.

The documented electrical cause of intermittent notes and stops in these consoles is the contact metal. Reuter used phosphor bronze contacts, and the AIO paper reports that inductive flyback arcing burns them and that the oxide which forms on them does not conduct, so a contact that looks intact stops passing current. Silver contacts behave differently because silver oxide conducts electricity, which is why a console fitted with silver contacts keeps working where a phosphor bronze one does not. The paper records that Klann supplied silver tubing for contact replacement for many years and names Swest, Inc. of Dallas, Texas as its supplier at the time of writing; both are named as sources of contact material for repair, not as makers of any Reuter switching or combination system, and because the paper is undated the supplier statement cannot be dated either.

The same paper lists mechanical and environmental causes beside the electrical one: corrosion from mouse urine, misalignment of the console mechanisms when the floor under the console settles, bent contacts, and worn wooden roller strips. These are the observations of the identified practitioners who wrote the paper rather than a failure survey, and they describe Reuter consoles; a fault at the console says nothing about the windchests, and a windchest symptom is not a console fault. Ciphers, runs and dead notes that originate in the chest belong to Reuter Chest Bleeds, Runs and Ciphers. The paper describes the corrective handling of bent contacts and worn roller strips as shop practice; that is work at the console for a technician, and it is not set out here.

The combination action and the switching system are different mechanisms, and a proposal should name them separately. The switching system connects keys and stops to the chests; the combination action sets and recalls registrations, and on older Reuter consoles it was pneumatic and tied to the hinged nameboard. In the Minot State project on a 1932 Kimball, Reuter built a new three-manual console with microprocessor solid-state switching and combination action and new DC power supplies, so console, switching, combination action and power supply changed together. At Central United Methodist Church in Traverse City, Michigan, The Diapason’s 2017 centennial feature on Reuter records the existing four-manual console refurbished with a solid-state control system, the console kept and the switching changed. The same feature records a new Reuter console at Trinity Lutheran Church in Houston in 2015 replacing a 1978 Holtkamp console, and a new movable Reuter console at St. John’s United Church of Christ in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in 2017, without specifying the control system in either case.

Wiring is a fourth item: on the 1983 Reuter at Northwestern State University, the university’s press release of 7 August 2026 quotes Reuter’s president, Albert ‘JR’ Neutel Jr., that instead of the big wad of cables and the umbilical the console now has five cables, replacing an arrangement that needed a large spool where the cable was stored back in the room. Memory is a fifth: the same project was reported by KSLA with more than 29,000 memory variations, and Reuter Opus 2197 at Second Congregational Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, dedicated in February 2000, was described in The Diapason with 32 levels of memory, storage and retrieval of each level on computer disk, playback of a recorded performance, and solid-state accessories for transposition, sequencer, MIDI and player.

Each of these is one project on one instrument. They show what a modernization can include; they do not show what Reuter usually did, what an instrument of a given year has, or what the company can do now. Reuter’s own repair page, carrying a 2026 copyright line, says that new solid-state combination actions and switching systems will provide countless years of quiet, trouble-free service; that is a marketing statement, and after the company’s 2022 scale-back a dated self-description does not establish present capability or availability. Within the documented project set, the named control systems on Reuter instruments are later retrofit work rather than original equipment, and no source names a Reuter control-system supplier, so solid-state equipment found in a Reuter console dates to its project rather than to the instrument and is not evidence of original Reuter equipment or of a Reuter product. Whether such a change is the right choice for a particular historic instrument, and what must be documented before deciding, is the subject of Restoring Versus Rebuilding a Historic Reuter.

One database record names a control-system maker for one new Reuter instrument; no other source reached does. Reuter’s current site, its own history, the 2026 Northwestern State release and the trade literature on its projects all describe control-system work, and none of them names a supplier, product or board designation; that is a consistent pattern across those sources, not proof that Reuter has no supplier or builds its own. The Northwestern State release shows how a lay description gets mistaken for a product name: the little green card that Neutel Jr. describes as the brain that controls all of this and sends a signal upstairs is a printed circuit board in the speaker’s own words, and neither the release nor any other source names its maker. The same release assigns different jobs to different firms, Reuter’s own team for the rebuild, Carolyn Sargent of Red River Pipe Organ for voicing and tuning, and Jeremy Rush of Walker Technical Company for digital enhancements, so Walker’s presence on that project is not evidence that Walker supplied the console control.

The exception is Opus 2245 of 2021 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas, where the Organ Historical Society Pipe Organ Database records the control system as Matters with a computerized or digital combination action, a sequencer and a crescendo; that is a single record for a single new instrument and says nothing about earlier work or about a standard supplier in any period.

For most Reuter records examined, including the 1917 Mattoon instrument, the 1966 Citadel instrument, the 1981 Graystone instrument and the 2021 revision of Opus 1899, the database’s control-system field reads Unknown or N/A, and the Opus 1900 record reads the same, so the database cannot presently be used to reconstruct Reuter’s control-system suppliers by period. What is in a particular console is therefore settled by inspecting the equipment and reading whatever project documentation survives for that instrument, and that record, rather than a builder name or a year, is the starting point for planning any change to it. Where Reuter’s own records for an instrument are held is covered by Finding Reuter Factory Records and Specifications.