> Erwinspiano@aol.com wrote: > > Ric > No offense but I don't care anymore. But I would be interested > in your opinion as to how his pianos sounded or how thick the boards > are or how they're thinned, which is how this thread got started. > Please NO more Chaldni patterns. Make a soundboard tell us all how > it came out and how it was thinned. > Regards--Dale No offense taken Dale. Sorry to have taken it as far as we did. How they sounded requires necessarily a bit subjective an answer. But I found them to be by and large very much in the vein of Hamburg Steinways, with a markedly longer lasting sustain in the treble. Very very clean sounding as well. The bass was very full and round, very suprisingly so in the 168. The 205 (or 210, ุsten??) was used for the closing dinner on Saturday night and it was very ... well german in the best sense of the word. As I said a bit earlier... if there was anything to put your finger on, it was that the upper base seemed to get a bit lost in big loud combinations of tones. Make a soundboard and tell us all how it came out eh ??.. I am afraid that is still beyond me... Neat sentiment tho... I hope I will be able to fill that bill better before so long. Be that as it may... I can offer the following observations. I seem to remember him mentioning something about soundboard thickness, but I dont have that figure. I can relate that the bass bridge in both pianos had lots of room to move, quite a ways from the rim. They had used a cantilever earlier in their history, but found a shorter bass string length and connecting directly to the bridge was preferable. The bridges were made of red and white beech I believe, the bulk of the bridge being red and the cap being white. The long bridge had in the 168 an abrupt turn at the lowest treble. View at http://www.steingraeber.de/ . The 168 also had a very wide butt to accommodate longer bass strings. He didn't get into the specifics of how they went about thinning the soundboard, only that his objective was to get these clearly defined sand lines around the edge of the panel and in front of the bridges. Grain of the soundboard went roughly 45 degrees off to the right of the long side of the case. In a private conversation he related that the panel was dried to about 4% MC (or less if he could get it). Flat ribs, glued into a caul. He made a point of the importance he placed on the stress along the grain achieved by this method. He had little regard for the machine crowned method of making a board, tho the reasons he gave were not of a technical nature per se and we didnt have all that much time to talk. He was firmly convinced that drying the board out was neccessary to handle the dryness of the European winter, and to achieve a tone and carry power that he felt a piano had to have. I wish I'd found more time to climb under and observe rib dimensions and numbers. He did show a picture showing a sizable curved cutoff bar in the lower bass, and if I remember correctly another shorter one in the butt region behind the long bridge I will remember this "build a soundboard for us" thought Dale, and next time I get a similiar chance I will try and better think through a more complete set of questions to pose, and supply a better answer. Cheers RicB -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. UiB, Bergen, Norway mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/ricmain.html http://www.hf.uib.no/grieg/personer/cv_RB.html
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