Soundboard Finishing

[bases-loaded@juno.com]

Hi Ron -

Since the boards look different from different angles, clearly you cannot
possibly expect your shim to be invisible from all angles, but who looks
at soundboards from the hinge side of the lid when the piano is in the
home?  And from the player's end the music desk inhibits the view.  And
the tail-end doesn't offer enough of a god peak because of the angle of
the lid - you'd have to squat to see in there.  The only view that offers
a 'good look' would seem to be from where the lid is propped, so that is
the angle from which I try to match the color.

Hey, it's an imperfect world!

Mark Potter
bases-loaded@juno.com

On Mon, 06 Nov 2000 06:59:33 -0600 Ron Nossaman <RNossaman@KSCABLE.com>
writes:
> After trying enough different processes to become discouraged by the 
> poor
> results, I've pretty much decided to just let the wood look like 
> wood. It's
> not the color of the wood, so much, that I find to be the biggest 
> problem.
> It's the light refraction properties, and I never found a reasonable 
> way
> around that. You put a nice new shim in an old board, and wet it 
> with
> something to check the "color" match. From one side of the piano, 
> you see a
> light soundboard with a dark shim. Walking to the other side, you 
> see a
> dark soundboard with a light shim. Same board, same shim. So what do 
> you
> stain to correct that? I admit I haven't really tried to match the
> refraction properties of the shims to that of the board, mostly 
> because I
> orient the grain rise according to where I want to stand when it 
> comes time
> to chisel the shim down. I suppose it's a sort of Philistine 
> attitude to
> impose practical considerations into a purely esthetic concern, but 
> I like
> to keep processes at a level where I can work them. Then again, 
> adjacent
> planks in a board are often reversed (from a refraction standpoint), 
> so you
> don't have a uniform point of reference to try to match in the first 
> place.
> How do you get around that?
> 
> Ron N