Hey Jude dude
I spoke with Udo Steingraeber Friday night at a private party/
Reception, in Which his new & 7 ft & 7inch piano was showcased by five of the most
awesome & prodigious L.A. First call, A list pianists & Jazz players.
BTW...Jude , he confirmed many things you state below.
The piano sounded awesome. T'was Dark, clear & singing & powerful. No
duplex scaling behind the bridge & each backscale length was nice & uniform as
it rested on a half round brass bearing bar.
I checked the residual treble bearing to be evenly about 1 1/2 degrees.
The rear lengths were ,in my opinion, adequate for bridge freedom.
It's tonal pocket is very similar to what I'm trying to achieve thru an
entirely different form of Sound board building. In my experience any board
dried to 4 % before ribbing would show compression rumpling a cross the panel
after stringing but none was in evidence on this piano. It had 15 taller than
wide ribs & a nice sweeping cutoff bar & aquite a thin panel as best as I
could tlel by peeping thru the nose bolt holes. Udo confirms using flat ribs in
a dish of sorts & palced a big emphasis about crown along the bridge. In
fact he had never heard of checking the crown along the ribs with a String. I
was honestly baffled by this. Certainly a certain amount of crown is
expected across the ribs but perhaps it was all propreitary which is as it should
be.
Whatever. The on going lessons for me are that, .....many things work &
some of them work really well. What I do know is the piano sounded truly
awesome & personally inspiring & also. It would only let me play minor key stuff
at first & sounded familiar to a certain D I once rebuilt but .....that's
another story.
David & Tanya put on a elegant & wonderful party for the Steingraeber crew
& friends & he can elaborate as he wishes.
Dale Erwin
As for Steingraber, they seem to be the only company that is really trying
to preserve a dome shape to their boards. Not only do they glue a
pre-crowned treble bridge to an unribbed board, they also custom fit the rim
all the way round, which makes more sense than assuming a 1 degree angle on
three sides will yield anything except more stress (not that I'm saying more
stress is undesirable). The Germans seem to have done copious research on
stress in soundboards as a tone-producing ingredient, according to Sauter.
There are many texts in German which have yet to be translated into English.
The Steingraber bass bridge is attached after the board is installed because
of the many centemeter variations in the plate casting. The bass bridge is
therefore hallowed out at the root to allow it to flex onto the crown of the
board.
Regards,
Jude Reveley, RPT
Absolute Piano Restoration, LLC
Lowell, Massachusetts
(978) 323-4545
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