Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2000 11:11:21 -0500 >I would likely point out that if the crack is new, it would show fairly clean >wood inside the crack. If the crack is older, it would either be dirty, or >darker then a freshly exposed surface. > >Gordon Large, RPT Ok, so how do you 1: see down into a crack well enough to ascertain whether or not the sides are clean, Not hard, it's open and obviously white. The finish on the board is also cracked. If you had ever seen one, you would not question this. 2: determine whether what you're seeing is indeed darker than a freshly exposed surface unless you have a freshly broken piece of the same material for comparison (there's considerable color variation among spruce planking used in soundboards), especially down in a narrow crack, 3: explain how jostling the piano around could crack the board in the first place so you can realistically claim that to be the cause of what you think may be a fresh crack. For myself it never dawned on me that the earthquake could have been the culprit until we were asked to help a friend get his upright out of the living room before the rest of that room collapsed. We went over and got the piano out and into another building on his property. Then, while we were sitting there talking about what had happened, I was behind the piano and the guys were in front, I was listening to them talking and daydreaming when I started noticing that the piano was riddled with cracks and that they were all white. I had never seen white cracks before and wondered about that. Then it dawned on me that it might have been caused by the earthquake. So we started examining the soundboards on every piano we saw after that. Life was not normal in those days; people frequently called for help to rescue a piano from a collapsing room or for a place to store their pianos because their homes were red-tagged as unsafe. We saw a lot of pianos that had obvious damage such as broken legs and case damage from things falling or being thrown against them. We frequently saw white cracks in soundboards. #3 is the one I'm questioning, since this seems to be taken automatically on faith. My father(since 1973), my partner and I (since 1984) had worked in this area tuning, rebuilding and refinishing pianos and had never previously seen white cracks in soundboards. We started seeing them in very many pianos in the days after the earthquake. It was fairly easy to take it automatically on faith. Ron N ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
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