Thanks Ron O One thing that I was really suprised about in tear down was how hard it was to pull the pins on the old bridge. My forte' is definitely not wood recognition at this point so I would be unable to tell the difference between Sycamore and HardRock Maple... but perhaps the origional was maple after all given how good its condition was ? I had gone down to Denmark thinking we would be making a beech bridge, but let myself get swayed (for the better I think) in going with the hard rock maple. It sure looks wonderful thats for sure. I still have to make a final decision on the string lengths / scale and then comes lay out and notching. Maple seems like nice stuff to work with when it comes to notching... which prompts me to ask what in folks experience is the best wood to work with for notching. Curious as hell now that I am on this path :) Cheers RicB Ric, Regarding the wood which was used for the bridge, it probably isn't maple, but Sycamore. Both are from the family Acer, but one is sacharum (rock maple) with an ADD of 7.0 to 7.2 gr/cc, while the other is Acer pseudoplatanus, with an ADD of around 6.0 gr/ cc. Bösendorfer used to use pseudoplatanus for their bridges, and it was inclined to allow the bridge pins to stand up. They both look the same but the rock maple is the real McCoy. Samual Wolfenden wrote about maple being weaker than Beech. He was referring to psuedoplatanus when he was writing about maple. He knew. Best regards, Ron O. -- OVERS PIANOS - SYDNEY Grand Piano Manufacturers
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