Interesting Old Soundboard

[Farrell]

I yanked the soundboard out of an old (qbout 1890) Knabe upright the other day. I've been looking at it since then and have started to wonder about it. Why did they make it the way they did? It is thin. Six millimeters thick along the long bridge, and thinned to 4.5 mm in the area of the bass bridge. Is this unusually thin? It had kinda hefty ribs, and quite some arc to them. After taking the ribs off the board, I see that most of them have about a 35 to 40-foot radius curve to them. Amazingly tight. And they must have been subject to a fair amount of compression crowning also because the back side of the ribs is curved quite a bit also, unless of course they cut/plane them that way. I thought all the old timers used 60-foot arcs?

Boy, I can see that one could spend a lot of time on the back of soundboards getting to know them.

Terry Farrell