Ebony bridge caps

[jimialeggio5 at comcast.net]

Michael, Ron, etal,

I've been following this thread with interest, and thinking about some of the 
concepts.

One piece of the explanations for the observed effect of the multi-species 
laminations doesn't make sense to me, and I wanted to run it by you all.

Regarding Michael's experiment, ie, three identical pianos with three different 
bridges, 1-solid maple,2-maple with mahogany laminations, and 3-maple with 
mahogany and ebony laminations... 

The explanations for the observed effects all seem to point to the effect of 
increased density/mass.

Here's my question. In the 2nd piano example, maple and mahogany laminations: 
since the specific gravity of mahogany (swietenia macrophylla= .51) is actually 
less than that of maple (.63), this bridge is actually less dense than the stand 
alone maple,  assuming absolute density is what we are looking at.

To my mind, this doesn't jive with the straight-up absolute density 
explanations...unless... the effect of increased density occurs as much from the 
layers of non-uniform densities introduced by layering different species (with 
differing densities), as from the 
actual absolute densities of the woods. 

Does this make any sense?

Jim I