He's helped restore the Mormon Tabernacle organ with its 22,000 pipes, so putting a "baby" church organ back to full working order will be a doddle for Wanganui's Garth Stevenson.
The small organ has been gifted to the Westmere Presbyterian Memorial Church, which itself is undergoing a major earthquake strengthening and makeover.
The Reverend Bruce Thompson, a retired military chaplain, saved the organ from being dumped by a Porirua church some years ago. Before that it had been in the Wellington Mission to Seamen building, but now he has donated it to the Westmere congregation.
It's now in the workshop at Mr Stevenson's Durie Hill home, arriving there last week "in a thousand pieces".
As well as restoring organs he is an accomplished player and is organist at St Paul's Presbyterian Church in the city.
"This project is a baby. From what I can gather there's 126 pipes in this one and it stands about 8ft (2.4m) tall."
That's shaded by the 3000 pipes of the Wurlitzer organ he is also restoring in his workshop. Most of the organs Mr Stevenson has worked on have between 1000 and 1200 pipes but there have been bigger ones. "I did work on the Salt Lake City Tabernacle organ years ago and that had 22,000 pipes."
He believes this project will take about a month to complete. "The bellows need releathering. They're well over 100 years old. Some other bits and pieces need small repairs and there's a spaghetti of lead tubing to be touched up."
It originally had two pedals to push the air through the pipes but now an electric blower takes care of the manual work.
"It was built in the 1800s, that much we know, and made by the Positive Organ Company in England. I've worked on a few of those organs before," he said.
Mr Stevenson hasn't got working plans but he knows enough about this type of organ to put it together without any template to follow.
Meanwhile work is progressing with the upgrade of the church built in 1924 as a memorial to those from the district who served in World War I.
Church spokesman David Bennett said the back wall of the brick church had been removed. "It was always a timber wall, unlike the rest of the building. We suspect that, due to the very tight building budget of the time, the back wall might have been left 'soft' to provide for a future extension," Mr Bennett said.
The church was built for $240 in 1924. He said the back wall had to allow steelwork to be put in place to bring the building up to earthquake building standards. "We're replacing this back area with a new foyer . . . We were trying to extend this foyer roof structure so that the organ could be fitted in there in a mezzanine floor, but had had problems with Historic NZ, who want the building to basically stay appearing as it always was."
Stage two of the project will see the existing community hall linked to the church and a new combined entrance to both buildings added in the centre.