I got an old Hammond (a Northern Hammond, actually) from the basement of the neighborhood church in Glace Bay (my home town) for free...all I had to do was get the thing out of there. This was around 30 years ago, when the church had switched over to a choir accompanied by guitars...sort of a "folk" mass.

I got three buddies (the organ alone was over 400 lbs.)and a pickup truck (paid them a case of 24 beer) and we got the thing out and took it to a guy in Westmount, Sydney NS, who was a well known Hammond expert. I also got the two tone cabinets (not Leslies) with it and the 25-note pedal board...none of them, including the organ, was functioning, and the stuff had been in the church basement for quite a few years. Luckily, nothing had seized up, and the generator would still turn.

Ray MacKay, the Hammond guy, told me it was a fairly rare Northern Hammond Model D, ca. 1939-42. They were made in the Northern Electric plant in Belleville Ontario, under contract with Hammond organ. He said it was essentially a BC in a C style cabinet. It had the additional generator and appropriate switching to create chorus effect and reverse colored presets similar to what we see on the B3.

The organ had quite a history behind it, having been transported from the church several times to be used in stage productions at the Savoy Theatre in town, back when Glace Bay was a booming coal mining town.

To make a long story short, I invested a few hundred dollars in getting it back to working order, and it eventually sold to a guy in Halifax NS a year later for a fairly decent sum at the time. As far as I know, it's still on the go, and the buyer added percussion and a few other extras and is running it through a Leslie 122.

I used the money to buy a Roland Jupiter 8, since I already had a Hammond B-3 with two Leslie 147RV.

So, ya never know...

Ian