From hx3keys@yahoo.com Sun Aug 02 09:39:29 2015
Subject:Re: Couple of Youtube vids of the HX3 live

Graham - I never really knew what I was doing with the WLM/HX3 conversion. I wanted to use the WLM drawbars and wiring harness for the keybeds but they were not compatible with the HX3 (positive ground for the most part) so I kept gutting more and more until all that was left was the body and keybeds. Wiring a donor set of drawbars form an old "E" model and the C/V & percussion switches was straight forward using the included ribbon cable and connector to the card. I spend a couple of hours playing around with the keybeds before settling on the idea of attaching a 1" piece of wire to each strand of the ribbon cable and sliding them behind each key. Only minor soldering and wiring skills were needed.

I do admit to an ability to come up with weird ideas for reuses of my inventory of hammond & leslies. Lately I've added a leslie upper rotor to my PR40 tone cabinet with wonderful results and using parts from an old 103 leslie to convert an 825 cabinet into a stereo stage amp with the 6x9s at 45 degrees across the front corners and the 15" for the bass. Used a 2.1 plate amp from PartsExpress to power it. Works great with my road rig and Vent. I'm currently using a rotosonic drum from the 103 and working on a scheme to add it to an HR40 I have in storage (needed for my CV hammond) to replace the PR40 w/Leslie rotor that is headed for its new home.

All in all, if you have a general knowledge of how the hammond works and a bit of ingenuity you shouldn't have any problem with a direct wired conversion. Powering it from MIDI info from a controller is a bit harder to work around if you don't have a system that is compatible.