Soundboard Panel Repair

[Farrell]

I've got a question for the belly folks on this list. I just got an inquiry from one of my customers that apparently had an accident with one of the soundboard panels I built for him.

Below is his predicament:

I need your advise, we had an accident with the 9' soundboard and it broke at the left hand corner, making a triangle of 28" (front of the piano bass side) by 26" straight back and 40" diagonally.

The brake is a clean brake and it is not located at a glue line, can it be fixed? will it be reliable? if yes, can you indicate best way to glue it and any other comment that you can provide us it will be much appreciated.

Below is my response:

Sorry to hear that. Even though the break looks clean, there will always be loose fibers sticking out, etc. and it may not actually fit back together as closely as it looks. It would  probably to okay to glue it back together with a wood glue like Titebond. But you'll need some sort of good clamping system.

Another way to address it if you have not yet trimmed the panel to final size, would be to cut the break straight, joint the edges and glue the jointed edges. However, to do this you would need some sort of panel clamping jigs. The first two methods have the advantage that the break should be uneven enough to help quite a bit with alignment.

However, if it were me, I think that I would use West System epoxy thickened with their #404 High Strength Adhesive Filler and use their two-step bonding process. That way you will have no worries at all about how close the two pieces actually do fit back together, and the glue line will still be very thin and not affect soundboard characteristics at all. Cleanup should be done with acetone. Epoxy has the advantage of not needing to be clamped - just tape or any type of light pressure to hold the pieces together while the epoxy cures - even leaning a couple pieces of lumber against the smaller section may give you enough positioning pressure.

I've never had to do such a repair (haven't dropped a panel yet!) and maybe I haven't thought of the best advice. Anyone else have any great ideas? I suppose any of us that rib panels may well run into this some day.

Terry Farrell
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