Hi all For a gob of years, everyone and his Aunt Sally was trying to come up with the magic formula that would make a Montgomery Ward violin sound like a Stradivarius. Dip as they might, it never worked. Seems that merely shaping a piece of wood to what looked like the right shape and applying the magic elixir didn't produce a Strad. A semi-starving and totally obscure woodworker somewhere discovered the process of tuning violin tops by tapping and scraping and could pretty reliably turn a $29.95 special into an exceptional sounding instrument regardless of what finish it ended up with. The lesson here being that what we see first isn't necessarily what counts most. As to piano soundboards, didn't the old manufacturers use what they had for finishing materials? If they had access to a modern lacquer or varnish would they still have used shellac? Also, I wonder if the percentage failure rate is any different now than it was then among *decent* quality instruments. As was said, a piano used to be a more major investment than it is now. I keep expecting to see the newest wave of ultra shabby imports displayed at the head of the check-out line at K-mart, next to the breath mints. If you weed out the categorically disposable stuff, I'd bet the failure rate per hundred pianos per year of age now is pretty close to what it was then. The very old stuff we see now (in any category) is what was good enough to last. The junk was burned for heat long ago. That alone would explain why you see very old boards in good condition, that's all that's left, and precious bloody few of them! If EVERY piano over 150 years old was still around and displaying a viable soundboard, I'd concede the point. That ain't the case. The routine replacement of soundboards is a pretty recent thing. Twenty years ago it just wasn't done in small shops. In fact, *none* of the rebuilders I knew of then even seemed to check the crown when rebuilding. They merely shimmed the cracks, refinished the board (with WHATEVER!!! <G>) and LOWERED the PLATE to get downbearing on the bridge! Talk about working in a blind fog, there are still plenty of "techs" doing this sort of thing today. When these 180 year old pianos were built there weren't any techs, per se, to service them. The manufacturer had to deal directly with the owner, who sometimes had the power of life and death over the manufacturer. "Service call to the Duke, better get moving". Strikes me as good incentive to turn out the best product you can. Consider, also, that what we think of as "room temperature" is considerably higher in the cold months than was the norm over a hundred years ago. They also tended to believe in the benefits of fresh air, and had poorer weather stripping, which let some of that humidity back in the building in spite of the coal or wood heat. Don't mean to sound argumentative here (HA!), I love a good revolution. Just a spoon full of perspective, a dash of contention, then stir. Ron Nossaman
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