sounding boards and wood construction

[Mark Kinsler]

There are parallels between the construction of a sounding board and that of 
wooden aircraft.  My guess is that more was learned about the structural 
properties of wood in fifty years of wood airplane construction than was 
learned in the previous 500 years of musical instrument work.

We're dealing here with 'stressed skin' construction, in which a piece of 
strong plywood--or perhaps a spruce sounding board--is glued to underlying 
ribs such that it forms itself into a curve.  This makes a good airplane 
wing as long as the glue remains reliable.  The strength lies in the 
curvature of the wing, much as a mailing tube is much stronger and stiffer 
than an equivalent sheet of cardboard.  There may also a certain amount of 
pre-load placed on aircraft structural components.

I believe that this is what some posters are thinking of in their analyses 
of sound board structure and behavior.  It may well be a good model for 
certain configurations.

I understand that there are both stressed sounding boards and carved 
sounding boards.  I don't believe that these would behave differently under 
downbearing stress.

What was the original question that started this thread?  I apparently 
entered at some sort of a peak in the discussion, so the issues aren't 
altogether clear to me.

Mark Kinsler
512 E Mulberry St. Lancaster, Ohio USA 43130 740-687-6368
http://home.earthlink.net/~mkinsler1

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