At 01:19 +0000 31/7/08, Anne Acker wrote: >The soundboard would be coated with good old shellac. A small soft >good quality paint brush should do it. If necessary, you can tint >the shellac with some powdered pigments to match the color of the >rest of the shellac. Anne, I must insist that I have never seen any piano made in any part of Europe that used a varnish containing shellac, and I have seen plenty of Erards too. The main constituent of soundboard varnish is, and always has been, gum sandarac or just plain resin, and it is generally sold here as "white hard varnish". Unlike French polish, which is made from shellac, soundboard varnish is very brittle and easily scratched. When you scrape a soundboard you end up with a dust that smells strongly of resin because it is resin. The varnish can easily be scraped from a soundboard, whereas a coating of shellac would be very difficult to remove by scraping. The varnish is applied in one single heavy coat, requiring considerable skill and speed on the part of the workman, which is the reason so many soundboards look so rough. Very few makers bothered to achieve anything like a glass finish on their soundboards, and certainly not Erard. A very good gloss finish can be achieved by leaving the varnish to harden for a few days and then French polishing over the top, which has the effect of pulling over the varnish and leaving a better-looking result than is achieved by the plain brushed varnish. I sometimes do this myself, and maybe the very few makers that did pay attention to the finish on their soundboards used some similar trick, but the basic finish was always a spirit varnish. >The bass strings are often brass covered, and truly beautiful when new. I think some of the early Erards had brass strings, but I make many sets of replacement strings for old Erards and most of them, like those on David's piano by the look of them, are of tinned copper. I think they also tried tinned brass and maybe even German silver (nickel silver). Broadwood and Brinsmead also used tinned copper for many years, and the strings certainly last very well, as do brass-covered strings. I had an old Schiedmayer vertical with brass covered bass strings that I left out in the English weather for about three years. At the end of that time every string sounded as good as the day I put it out! JD
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