I seem to have been learning, no? Greg Newell Greg's Piano Forté www.gregspianoforte.com 216-226-3791 (office) 216-470-8634 (mobile) -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Ron Nossaman Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2008 11:05 AM To: Pianotech List Subject: Re: Compression ridges was :Do you dry the ribs, along with the board, prior to gluing ? You quit stoking the fire for a minute, and the darkness creeps back in. A flexible treble goes "dink". The treble needs to be stiff, which is what the fish is for. The bass cutoff diminishes unwanted spurious resonances and makes the ribs shorter in the killer octave - to stiffen them. Too stiff a treble shrieks, which adding mass cures. So an overly stiff treble that's mass loaded is highly functional while still being well above minimally adequate stiffness. That's a built in safety margin for future climatic aging and deterioration. Too stiff a bass is thin and lacks fundamental. Too heavy a bass clangs. The bass works well when the assembly is light and flexible down there. The purpose of floating the bass in small grands, and moving the bridge to increase back scale length, is to add flexibility and amplitude of movement. The use of mass loads on the low tenor or high bass bridge is an after the fact attempt to blend any existing tonality mismatch across the break if the builder didn't get exactly what he wanted with the design. Nobody's perfect, so there's make up. Ron N
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