It would be interesting to go to the local lumberyard, pick out a 2x12 spruce/pine/fir plank with straight grain and pith running through the center of the board, 10-12 growth rings lines per inchish (easily achievable in 2nd growth stock), rip the quarter sawn segments away from the pith, dry the sucker and make a soundboard...kind of like the sacred Koto my brother and I made in our wasted youth...out of cdx plywood. Jim On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 10:06 AM, <pianoguru at cox.net> wrote: > Years ago I was very much into harpsichord building. I was awarded a > studies abroad grant from the university were I worked. The object of my > study was harpsichords. Interviewing an English builder was enlightening > regarding soundboards in these early instruments. > > He believed that the elaborate decorative painting of soundboards was > primarily to hide the defects in the wood. He was often surprised when he > opened the bottom of an old instrument at how poor the wood was, when > revealed from the bottom side. He described these soundboards as looking > like a patchwork quilt. He was even more surprised when many of these > instruments with cosmetically poor soundboards where the better sounding > instruments. > > The one-liner that best describes his observations is this: "You could > always tell when England was at war. The Navy got all of the good spruce > and the harpsichord builder has to resort to old apple crates for soundboard > material." > > Frank Emerson > > -- grandpianosolutions.com Shirley, MA (978) 425-9026 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090312/560447bf/attachment.html>
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