At 10:17 AM -0500 1/18/02, Stephen Birkett wrote: >- remember my orange crate stock soundboard? Playing devil's >advocate, though, I would suggest that you can pretty much make a >decent board out of _any_ wood by modifying design parameters to >accomodate...but that is treading into the territory of the "big >soundboard thread".... At least your orange box will make the numerical modeling a bit easier, since some of the numbers will already be stencilled onto it! No one's yet mentioned the crown along the board. I've never seen this actually done but one of my seniors in England has described to me how he does it. He planes (with a shooting plane of course) the edges of the deals very slightly convex so that when they are glued up, the board takes on a crown along the length and the finished article is more dome-like than bridge-like. He claims this is no new idea and inspection of certain pianos tends to confirm this. I keep meaning to fix a time with him when he can demonstrate exactly what he does. It's probably not half as frightening as it sounds. As to the spruce question, it is of course a very American notion that it is THE soundboard wood. The first time I even heard of it was when I began to stock Kawais in the 1980's and I always thought it looked a bit second-rate. I have a good stock of European spruce - where from I don't know, but it's excellent. New time I shall get it from the forests near Fazioli's place in Trentino where the trees are all fed with magic minerals three times a day. JD
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