By mid-morning David Petty has finished his quadruple shot latte and has moved on to the cups of Earl Grey tea he chugs throughout the day.  He has a big day ahead of him and needs to stay alert. David is working on the first commissioned instrument of his solo career—a small portable pipe organ (mostly) hand crafted in the style of the 17th century. Today he’ll begin constructing the windchest, often referred to as the heart and lungs of the instrument because it distributes the air that will bring the 180 wood and metal pipes to life. It is such a critical, precision-oriented phase in the instrument’s construction that later David will wonder if it’s to blame for an unexpected high blood pressure diagnosis.

David stands in front of one of the many industrial-sized power tools crowding his workshop (a glorified two-car garage attached to his house) and pulls a spinning blade toward him, making a notch in wooden rails that will form the windchest frame. Ribs will fit into the notches, delineating narrow air channels that supply wind to all the pipes corresponding to a single note on the keyboard. The idea is to maximize wind flow. If the pipes don’t get wind fast enough, they gasp. David’s job is to ensure they can speak promptly. After each notch, David takes out a digital caliper to measure its width.

He’s getting within a couple tenths of a millimeter of accuracy. “So it’s not perfect,” he says. “But we’re talking about the thickness of a couple sheets of paper. So you ask,”—though no one did—“could I get it more precise? Probably. But do I need to? I don’t think so. A tenth of a millimeter is not going to kill me. One millimeter might.”

David looks around, his tongue flicking between the corners of his mouth, as if trying to decide whether to confess. He’s ashamed to admit it, but there is a way to be more precise. Instead of marking the wood with a pencil (which makes a line about half a millimeter thick) he could’ve used a knife. “If my teacher saw me do it this way, he’d call it sloppy. But this is fine. You can talk about precision all you want but it’s still your eye you’re relying on. I’m not going to obsess.”

David moved his family to Eugene, Oregon because he wanted to learn the art of organ craftsmanship from the best. He wanted to study under John Brombaugh. The organs built by Brombaugh are sought after around the world. They have found homes in Sweden, Japan, and in more than 60 locations throughout the United States. Some have taken more than 10 years to complete and have cost close to two million dollars. David spent a turbulent four and half years working in Brombaugh’s shop learning the trade. Brombaugh, age 68, recently announced his retirement, but David was eager to strike out on his own long before that.

Like Brombaugh, David is also building what’s called a tracker organ. Prior to electricity, pipe organs operated by mechanical action, a system of rods or “trackers” that directly connected the keys to valves under the pipes. Although electricity simplified the operating mechanism, enabling pipe organs to be mass-produced, mechanical action instruments are thought to be superior by the discriminating player, listener and builder.

The idea is to construct the kind of instrument that Johann Sebastian Bach composed for, the kind of instrument his music was meant to be performed on, and one that reproduces the old sounds of organs built in the 17th and 18th centuries as faithfully as possible.

The first thing David did upon moving to Oregon was grow a ponytail—simply because, like the many whims he’s turned into reality, he’d always wanted to try it. David is not afraid—stressful as it might be—to take risks. He tried the corporate thing, made some money, but got out when he felt it was time. He wanted to study languages so he went back to school and now speaks five. He dreamt of building pipe organs, and after a major life upheaval and a trying apprenticeship, here he is. And on some days, at some moments, that seems to be enough.

When he left the Brombaugh shop, David cut off his ponytail as unceremoniously as he decided to grow it. He was about to start his own business, and, in his mind, people were not going to hand over $50,000 to some guy with a ponytail.

David claims to not like to talk about his years at the Brombaugh shop but he can’t seem to stay off the topic.  He tells a story about last summer when Mary Preston, a world-renowned organist, was in town to perform in the Oregon Bach Festival.   The Pettys were entertaining the organist and a few other members of the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists—among them Brombaugh and his wife Christa.

They had been having a pleasant luncheon when David mentioned that he had started working on his first organ, a “practice piece” called Opus 1. He had left Brombaugh’s employ half a year earlier. As David tells it, Brombaugh’s wife became very excited and wanted to see his workshop. “Well after seeing it, she just flew up the stairs, waving her arms and yelling ‘John, John, you must come see, he’s building an organ! It’s beautiful and you must come see it!’” According to David, Brombaugh turned red, clenched his teeth and wouldn’t budge. “He’s having lunch in my house! Drinking my wine!” David’s own face is red now and his left fist is raised. “And he would not come down and look at my shop.”

To heighten the slight, Brombaugh was later quoted in a local newspaper saying that his retirement meant there probably wouldn’t be another organ builder in Eugene.

David wants very badly to connect on a personal and professional level with his former master, but realizes this might not happen until he builds his first significant work.

“I am not building organs to prove anything to John Brombaugh,” David insists, his chin buoyant. “I’m doing it because I love it. Sometimes I get worked up and forget that. But I can tell you that the further I get from my employment in his shop, the better I feel.”