Inspired by my latest Hammond-acquisition, a 1963 A-102 (this is a Hammond A-100 series tone wheel organ in what was called a ‘French-Provincial’ cabinet, the one with the shapely legs), I’ve been trailing the web to find more information about it, and found a really cool video about the manufacturing process of the Hammond organs, probably from the 50-ies or so:

Most revealing I thought (at about 3:55) is where it is explained that the capacitor is matched to the coil using an automatic process; I’ve often heard that this was hand-matched, but this does not seem to be the case, if this video can be used as any reference. You can see that the lady who is installing the caps uses a measurement device of sorts, so it seems to me that the capacity is derived by formula from the measurement made to, presumably, the coils’ characteristics.

This gives some hop to those that want to recap a tone generator. What is being measured, and how this then translates to the proper value selection for the cap I don’t know, would be great to find out.