turns out it just fits in my little apartment, and the fee for shipping it down was not too outrageous. so here it is in my living room, 10 feet tall and six feet wide and big enough that i had to awkwardly kludge two photos together to get a view of most of it.
it was originally powered by a crank on the side, but somewhere along the line my grandfather did some restoration of it, and modernized it with a vacuum motor.
the pipes are fake-- really just wooden dowels painted gold-- and slide right off as one unit. so should i move somewhere that doesn't have 10-foot ceilings, i'll be ok.
