Pipe organ parts filled the makeshift workshop at St. Joseph’s Church in Camillus.

Thousands and thousands of parts covered every surface. Small wooden parts. Mechanical parts for keyboards. Big and little parts everywhere.
It was 2 ½ years ago, and Tomasz Lewtak was beginning to assemble a 2,500-pipe organ for St. Joseph’s, where he is the music director. As he entered the workshop on one of those first
mornings, he found a note from someone with a sense of humor:

“Some Assembly Required.”

After days and days, then months and months of work, little assembly is left as Lewtak puts the finishing touches on the grand pipe organ.
He started out reluctantly.

“Frankly, I didn’t really want to do this,” Lewtak said. “I knew what I was getting into.”

But the Rev. John Finnegan, who retired last year from St. Joseph’s, was persuasive.
St. Louis Catholic Church in Oswego closed Dec. 31, 2000. Finnegan knew the church was finding it tough to dispose of an old pipe organ.
Finnegan insisted they check it out.
The organ, Lewtak said, was built in 1896. It looked to be in decent shape.

They bought it for a little more than $10,000.
Later, parts fell apart when he touched them. Everything needed a thorough cleaning.

On more thing: The Oswego church was about one-third the size of St. Joseph’s. The old organ was much too small, tuned and “voiced” too softly for its new home. That meant Lewtak would have to double its size – from 1,200 pipes to about 2,500.
“I contracted with a German firm and ordered 1,200 additional pipes,“ Lewtak said. “And I ordered a ton of other parts, literally thousands.”
Seventy-five percent of the organ is new.

The pipes, an alloy of lead and tin, range from the size of a pencil to ones 17 feet high.
The choir loft in the west wing of the cross-shaped church is home to the three-story organ. The church garage is his workshop.
Ben Merchant, of Kerner & Merchant Pipe Organ Builders of East Syracuse, said the expansion made it a large organ.

Merchant said the organs at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Syracuse and Crouse College at Syracuse University are bigger.

“But this is a good-size instrument,” he said.

Lewtak grew up in Gdansk, Poland, and began attending professional music school when he was 7 years old. In college in Poland, he majored in organ performance and minored in organ building, the subject of his thesis.

“During college, I really had hands-on experience,” Lewtak said. “It was mandatory to find an organ builder to serve a month or two internship. I participated in a similar operation to this in a very large church in Poland.”

Lewtak came to the United States in 1993 and studied organ music in graduate school at Binghamton University. He has been the music director for St. Joseph’s for seven years after a stint at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Baldwinsville.

“To be an organ builder, you must be a carpenter, a good mechanic, an electrician and know some tricks to make it happen,” Lewtak said.
“Like dipping bricks in wax and wrapping them in paper so they don’t absorb unwanted moisture.”
The bricks add pressure in the bellows.
He installed the mechanical and electrical components. That included re-leathering one of the old bellows that push air into the wind chests and eventually the pipes. He built a second bellow from scratch.

He built, from scratch, the casing for the organ from birch and poplar. The casing houses the main body of the organ and its 2,500 pipes. Lewtak said he visited almost every lumberyard in Central New York to find the perfect pieces of wood.
And he assembled three keyboards, of 58 keys each, and the cedar strips that are crucial to their operation.

The outside façade and a fine-tuning of the working pipes and components are all that need to be completed for its unveiling sometime this fall.
Lewtak said the façade needs to look like fine furniture. He’ll use a combination of maple and mahogany.

“We are hoping this will become a cultural magnet for the area, that it will draw great performers,” Lewtak said.

“We are thinking about establishing an organ series, with a regular schedule.”
When Finnegan proposed building an organ, Lewtak knew the cost of having a professional company build it would have meant years of fund raising.

“A church this size, according to my principles, should have a pipe organ,” Lewtak said. “It adds to the prestige of this place. It puts the church on the cultural map with something like this.”
“The organ is the king of instruments, associated with power.”

Merchant, who serviced the organ when it was in Oswego, said he was asked for a price quote when St. Joseph’s first considered the project.

“We would have installed it, as it was (in Oswego) for about $200,000. A new organ, at the expanded size, about a half-million dollars,” Merchant said. “If you hired a premier organ builder, you’re taking about three-quarters of a million dollars.”

With Lewtak doing the work as his donation to the church, it will cost about 30 percent of what a company would have charged.

Looking back on his project, Lewtak said time was his biggest enemy and his biggest sacrifice.
“My wife is a saint,” said Lewtak, 37, who lives with his wife, Jolanta, and three sons on Barnwood Lane, Camillus.

“My work as a music director here is full time in addition to the hours I put in on the organ.”
Soon, a joyful noise will fill the church.
And what will Lewtak play for the first performance?

“I’m certain I will at least play Bach’s ‘Toccata in D,’” Lewtak said.