Baby Barrel Organs

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My father, as a boy, had a musical box, a small plain square box with a little handle on the top and a picture stuck on the underside.

It played an old Music Hall tune called “Hold your Hand Out, You Naughty Boy”.

Strange as it may seem, I have yet to find the sheet music for this although I expect I could search the web and buy it from somewhere.

Well my brothers and I used to have hours of fun with this although it was always put away afterwards, out of reach.

“It’s not a toy” he would say, but the truth is he did not want it damaged.

When his first grandchild arrived it was lovingly passed on.

There were more grandchildren to follow, but only one musical box.

I therefore thought it would be nice to make a few more of these to ‘keep in family’ so to speak. Well, rather than the plain little Victorian box, I designed a ‘box’ as a small harp, an exact scale model of a harp I had built some 30 years ago. However it took weeks of work and I only finished two models before giving up. My nephews and nieces were having offspring faster than I could build them!

So a new plan was to make something simpler to manufacture.

A production line of small Barrel Organs.

The making of the little barrel organs required quite a lot of fretwork. Now although I have a ‘go-faster’ electric model I much prefer to use a hand fretsaw.

I still have a number of my father’s carpentry tools including his “Hobbies” fretsaw and all the side frames for the organ cart (16 off - painted red) were cut out with his old saw.

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Using it, takes me back to the days when Dad made all our toys. After the war toys were hard to come by and quite expensive. The earliest I remember, was an alphabet of wooden letters, about 2” high, cut out of ¼” ply. It must have taken him ages and maybe a few broken blades. As there was only one of each letter, we learnt the alphabet but could only make up short words with no repeat letters.

I can also remember “tumbling acrobats”. A small jointed figure, hanging by his arms from a twisted bit of string between two rods. Squeezing the rods together caused the string to unwind and the little figure flew round!

Batch production on the organs continued and the above picture shows the organs and carts having had a 'lick of paint'. I have to admit I cheated and bought the wheels ready made. They came a horrible colour and I had to give them a coat of yellow paint.

Here is a couple of pics of the finished Musical Boxes.

They took me four weeks to make (all eight) with the slowest part being the painting. I had to wait 24 hours between coats. They have now all gone to good homes.

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And a close up of one of them. I put their initials on each one so that they didn't get them mixed up.

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Originally posted on Tracker-bar in March 2009.

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