Old Erard

[John Delacour]

At 01:19 +0000 31/7/08, Anne Acker wrote:

>The soundboard would be coated with good old shellac.  A small soft 
>good quality paint brush should do it.  If necessary, you can tint 
>the shellac with some powdered pigments to match the color of the 
>rest of the shellac.

Anne, I must insist that I have never seen any piano made in any part 
of Europe that used a varnish containing shellac, and I have seen 
plenty of Erards too.  The main constituent of soundboard varnish is, 
and always has been, gum sandarac or just plain resin, and it is 
generally sold here as "white hard varnish".  Unlike French polish, 
which is made from shellac, soundboard varnish is very brittle and 
easily scratched.  When you scrape a soundboard you end up with a 
dust that smells strongly of resin because it is resin.  The varnish 
can easily be scraped from a soundboard, whereas a coating of shellac 
would be very difficult to remove by scraping.  The varnish is 
applied in one single heavy coat, requiring considerable skill and 
speed on the part of the workman, which is the reason so many 
soundboards look so rough.  Very few makers bothered to achieve 
anything like a glass finish on their soundboards, and certainly not 
Erard.

A very good gloss finish can be achieved by leaving the varnish to 
harden for a few days and then French polishing over the top, which 
has the effect of pulling over the varnish and leaving a 
better-looking result than is achieved by the plain brushed varnish. 
I sometimes do this myself, and maybe the very few makers that did 
pay attention to the finish on their soundboards used some similar 
trick, but the basic finish was always a spirit varnish.

>The bass strings are often brass covered, and truly beautiful when new.

I think some of the early Erards had brass strings, but I make many 
sets of replacement strings for old Erards and most of them, like 
those on David's piano by the look of them, are of tinned copper.  I 
think they also tried tinned brass and maybe even German silver 
(nickel silver).  Broadwood and Brinsmead also used tinned copper for 
many years, and the strings certainly last very well, as do 
brass-covered strings.  I had an old Schiedmayer vertical with brass 
covered bass strings that I left out in the English weather for about 
three years.  At the end of that time every string sounded as good as 
the day I put it out!


JD