I knew I could build pipes to play just about any reasonable pitch I wanted to, so long as I did not apply too much air pressure. My next set of experiments revolved around coming up with a simple 'valve box' design that I could build. At the time, I didn't know such a thing is called a 'wind chest' in organ terminology. The above figure shows the cross section of the wind chest design I ended up using. The fancy drawings came much later though.
All dimensions are in millimeters.
The valve blocks are all sanded smooth, and so is the bottom of the wind chest. The leaf springs apply pressure exactly over the center of the hole below, thus causing for a tight seal of the two flat surfaces. The valve blocks are rounded slightly towards the back. I accomplished this by breaking the valves into two rows of whole-tone scales. The original experimental pipes I built were of a difficult design to execute, as the front of the pipe was actually sandwiched between the two sides.