New Baldwin L Advice

[Ron Nossaman]

>Thanks for the tidbits Ron. Rotary cut maple for bridge eigh? Like rotary
>cut maple for the supply-house pinblocks. I dunno, but I wonder what any
>types of strength testing has been done on rotary cut (obviously kinda flat
>sawn and then bent flat) and then laminated VS quarter sawn and laminated.
>Just seems like you gotta loose a lot of the wood properties when you unwind
>a tree and squish it flat like that. I mean, you can chop it up and make
>paper out of it, but that doesn't necessarily make for a good bridge or pin
>block.
>
>Terry Farrell

Yep, rotary cut. Looking at the cross sectional bridge sample cut-off on
the parts display board Baldwin dealers are genetically bound to display at
retail central, one sees a bridge assembled from rotary cut maple, complete
with radial separations every 3mm or so as a result of taking too thick a
cut, with the (I forget what it's called backing bar that compresses the
wood as it's peeled off to minimize this sort of radial checking) not set
close enough - just like the cheap supply house pinblock material. In the
9-11 ply pinblock, it seems to be a definite detriment, but considerably
less so in the Baldwin bridges. In the pinblocks, thinner laminations would
result in less fiber(alt - fibre) damage, and more "radial integrity",
regardless of the fact that radial cut stock is essentially the same as
flat sawn, only less solid, until it's assembled. Thinner is better, up to
a point. In the Baldwin bridges, rotary cut, vertically laminated, is very
similar to solid quarter sawn stock once the glue is added to the
laminations. If they used more and thinner laminations of the same rotary
cut stock, they would have a stiffer more dense bridge (not necessarily
either better or worse), but they could dogleg the bridge more to better
accommodate the scale breaks as a result of the increased flexibility of
the individual laminations, and not have to have such a narrow separation
between front and rear bridge pin rows on that unison just above the first
tenor break. 

The number and thickness of laminations in the final product have a lot to
do with how much (if any) diminishment of the magical properties of the
original chunk of wood are incurred in the rotary cutting process. 

It's kind of scary to see how chopped up those laminations are in the cross
section sample, but it doesn't seem to noticeably hurt the performance of
the bridge. 

For what it's worth, I was more expecting challenge on the 72' radius rib
crown than the bridge construction. That's what I get for second guessing.


Ron N