Soundboard Finishing

[Ron Nossaman]

>I know this won't be as much fun as all the bantering on the list lately,
>but the last couple of soundboards I've repaired came out very inconsistent
>in color.  I usually use the Spurlock shimming system and put a light coat
>of Deft to finish.  I have tried oil stains, touchup pens, dyes, etc.  The
>last one had a couple of previous shims in it, so I had old soundboard color
>(varied), old shim color, new shim color.  Yikes!  I tried a softwood
>preparation by Minwax (for even stain absorption), then Minwax stains, but
>__as soon as anything is put on the board, it gets dark__ and inconsistent.
>Any suggestions? I don't have this problem with some boards.  Thanks!!
>
>Lance Lafargue, RPT


After trying enough different processes to become discouraged by the poor
results, I've pretty much decided to just let the wood look like wood. It's
not the color of the wood, so much, that I find to be the biggest problem.
It's the light refraction properties, and I never found a reasonable way
around that. You put a nice new shim in an old board, and wet it with
something to check the "color" match. From one side of the piano, you see a
light soundboard with a dark shim. Walking to the other side, you see a
dark soundboard with a light shim. Same board, same shim. So what do you
stain to correct that? I admit I haven't really tried to match the
refraction properties of the shims to that of the board, mostly because I
orient the grain rise according to where I want to stand when it comes time
to chisel the shim down. I suppose it's a sort of Philistine attitude to
impose practical considerations into a purely esthetic concern, but I like
to keep processes at a level where I can work them. Then again, adjacent
planks in a board are often reversed (from a refraction standpoint), so you
don't have a uniform point of reference to try to match in the first place.
How do you get around that?

Ron N