my own Soundboard

[Greg Newell]

John,
    What are "the deals" in your sentence " He planes (with a shooting
plane of course) the
edges of the deals very slightly convex so that when they are glued
up, the board takes on a crown along the length and the finished
article is more dome-like than bridge-like."
    Are these the ribs spoken of in our American english :-)? If so it
very much has been mentioned in the topic of rib crowning boards and I
would dearly love to hear how your friend does it!

Greg

John Delacour wrote:

> At 10:17 AM -0500 1/18/02, Stephen Birkett wrote:
>
> >- remember my orange crate stock soundboard?  Playing devil's
> >advocate, though, I would suggest that you can pretty much make a
> >decent board out of _any_ wood by modifying design parameters to
> >accomodate...but that is treading into the territory of the "big
> >soundboard thread"....
>
> At least your orange box will make the numerical modeling a bit
> easier, since some of the numbers will already be stencilled onto it!
>
> No one's yet mentioned the crown along the board.  I've never seen
> this actually done but one of my seniors in England has described to
> me how he does it.  He planes (with a shooting plane of course) the
> edges of the deals very slightly convex so that when they are glued
> up, the board takes on a crown along the length and the finished
> article is more dome-like than bridge-like.  He claims this is no new
> idea and inspection of certain pianos tends to confirm this.  I keep
> meaning to fix a time with him when he can demonstrate exactly what
> he does.  It's probably not half as frightening as it sounds.
>
> As to the spruce question, it is of course a very American notion
> that it is THE soundboard wood.  The first time I even heard of it
> was when I began to stock Kawais in the 1980's and I always thought
> it looked a bit second-rate.  I have a good stock of European spruce
> - where from I don't know, but it's excellent.  New time I shall get
> it from the forests near Fazioli's place in Trentino where the trees
> are all fed with magic minerals three times a day.
>
> JD

--
Greg Newell
mailto:gnewell@ameritech.net