more on ribs and beam stuff

[Ron Nossaman]

At 09:43 AM 12/9/98 +0000, you wrote:
>I took this of rec.music.makers.builders: I wonder if piano soundboard
>makers in the past used wet wood.
>
------- whack --------
>
>Barrie,  




Barrie,

Interesting but, as usual for this sort of thing, generates more questions
than answers. I can see how "washing" rough dimensioned wood could flush out
some of the resins, at least on the surface, and give it a little better
strength/weight ratio by making it a little lighter when it's dried out. Why
not just chose a less resinous plank in the first place, if that's important
to the builder? As long as these questions have been around, I wonder that I
have never read anything about resins washing out of submerged logs over a
number of years. I read about the preservation (not the improvement) of high
quality timber being "mined" from the bottom of cold water lakes, but
nothing definitive on improvement through soaking. I sort of doubt that
there would be enough water circulation through a log to wash much resin out
of the center. I know green wood will absorb PEG clear through so it won't
crack and split when the carving is done, but that isn't instrument making,
and it's adding something, rather than flushing something out. In any case,
as was pointed out, that's the way wood was transported and there wasn't any
choice. Also, the NOT "old masters" who made terrible instruments were using
the same wood, obtained from the same source and washed in the same water
(weren't they?), so it seems rather a moot point. Could it be that the skill
of the maker might be a factor in obtaining the results? No one ever
considers that in their speculations. Experiments like this seem biased
toward producing the results the experimenter is hoping for, rather than to
try to accumulate any real educational data. It is at least as valuable to
disprove something as it is to prove it but people don't seem too interested
in what is *not* as a means of helping to determine what *is*. 

Just a few musings from a perpetual malcontent. 

Thanks for the post, got any more on this subject?







 Ron