Soundboards: Thickness and Area

Richard Brekne Richard.Brekne@grieg.uib.no
Mon, 20 Oct 2003 17:49:52 +0200


Apprapoe freeing up the edges of the board Dale,

One of the segements of Steingrębers lecture in Helsinki this past
weekend was about this. He showed a few pictures of how they go about
this at their factory and breifly discussed some of the goals in their
proceedure. 

They spread dark sand on the panel and then pound a bit on the bridge to
see where the sand settles. They remove material from the soundboard
until the sand accumulates in a very clearly defined thin boarder line
about the edges of the entire soundboard. They are particularily
concerned with the K point area which corresponds to the area in the
treble where the so called killer octave phenomena occurs. But all
around the edge of the soundboard they want a precisely defined line of
sand. 

Tho he didnt mention it, the pictures also revealed an accumulation of a
line of sand just at the leading edge of the bridge as well. I didnt get
a chance to ask him if that was done on purpose or not.

Cheers
RicB

> Erwinspiano@aol.com wrote:
> 
>          Glenn
>   You're asking the hard technical questions. My engineer friend say
> that when his friends get picky with details the comment is "hey your
> not building a piano ya know" I take that as a compliment. In this
> case we are but fortunately board thinning isn't a mystery. It however
> helps to have an organized approach to thinning. If you ask 5 belly
> guys how they do it you'll get five different answers.
>    The amount of thinning depends on what your goals is & what you
> think is benifiacial to freeing up the edges of a board. The thinning
> in most regimines includes thinning along the spine(straight side), on
> around the tail around the curve and stopping short of the top treble
> area which needs no or little thinning.
> Some also thin along the belly rail up to the offset of the
> board ,which is sometimes desireable depending on the overal thickness
> of the board to start.
>   Thinning is mostly restricted
> 
> 

-- 
Richard Brekne
RPT, N.P.T.F.
UiB, Bergen, Norway
mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no
http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/ricmain.html
http://www.hf.uib.no/grieg/personer/cv_RB.html

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