To anybody willing to build its own instrument, I suggest to see also some sites of self builders of traditional pipe organs which, even if activated by a keyboard and not by a mechanical action, they contain a lot of very precious basic technical information on construction of pipes, bellows, chests and other details difficult to find elsewhere.
You may navigate these sites:
http://home.earthlink.net/~anelsen/organ.htm
www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html
Music carton books and paper rollsThe mechanical music instruments work thanks to carton books or paper rolls which represent the arrangement to be performed.
If you wish to punch the paper rolls you need to build a puncher. You may find web sites where the project of such a machine is offered (manual or automatic with MIDI interface)
John Smith himself offers the design of a puncher
Then you may see www.crankorgan.com which proposes the design of a CNC puncher or http://members.aol.com/midpunch where Bob Essex proposes his booklet entitled A Computer Controlled Music Roll Punch Machine, complete with MIDster PUNCH Software. The booklet is illustrated with drawings and pictures and describes how he built the punch mechanism with parts from an old photocopier, (an old daisywheel or dot-matrix typewriter might be just as good) the relatively simple electronics circuit with diagrams, setting up, music scales etc. The punch machine connects to the printer port of a PC with a standard printer cable. The software is produced to professional standards and is designed to read music in standard MIDI files and convert the information to data signals to control the punch. It is an executable program which works in conjunction with a simple, straightforward setting-up program to enable the punch to produce music rolls or books in your own particular format.
If you wish a simpler life, I suggest to contact Mr. Marco Giannotto of Torino, Italy on the web site www.giralanota.it. He can punch custom music cartons and paper rolls professionally and has a catalogue of famous italian songs.
In any case, if you wish to brew your rolls, you must first draw or print on the paper the holes to be punched. Do not worry, four good young Dutch software designers put freely at your disposal a beautiful program developed by them, called MIDIBOEUK, which, fed by a MIDI file containing a song and and entering the phisical dimensions of the roll or carton, will print the whole sequence. After that you can punch. The site is http://huizen.daxis.nl/~Ppaardekam/midien.htm
Actually the MIDIBOEUK program is available in Dutch, French and English language, it is very intuitive and well documented.
If you can't play or orchestration is not your job, to compose the songs you can download plenty of songs in MIDI format from the web. There are several sites where to find them for free, specially in the band organ sector.
Once you have a generic MIDI file, to check that the notes of the song do not exceed the 20 or 26 or the notes available in your organ, you may use a MIDI sequencer program. There are many solutions to choose, my personal experience is with CAKEWALK or Powertracks or Harmony Assistant. The first two also feature a piano roll graphic editor.