The finite life of wood grain

[Euphonious Thumpe]

     Well, "good sound" is subjective-----I'll grant them that. But the ossification process that's occurring in old wood ( as the resins progress on the road to becoming amber--classified as a gemstone- and the cells become more vacuous due to this and shrinkage of the resins, certainly effects the tone in some way. Whether you like it ( as I do ) or not is a matter of opinion, and no-one's opinion is better than another's. 
    They're just opinions.
    I will say, though, that the increasing stiffness of old wood, and the already-culminated ( for all practical purposes ) compression set lends credence to the argument that a properly recrowned soundboard ( if it can be effected ) is less likely to develop cracks, or fail again, in the future.
    And it saves some beautiful trees.

Euphonious Thumpe


--- On Wed, 10/22/08, Richard Brekne <ricb at pianostemmer.no> wrote:

> From: Richard Brekne <ricb at pianostemmer.no>
> Subject: The finite life of wood grain
> To: pianotech at ptg.org
> Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 5:38 AM
> Well of course you are the one who is correct here Thumpy.
> And for the 
> record... just about everyones opinion gets ridiculed here
> by someone or 
> another... but there is not much to do about that now is
> there.
> 
> Old wood that is in good shape can of course be re-used in
> SB 
> construction in a variety of ways and is in fact done so by
> competent 
> folks around the globe all the time. Those that deny this
> either have a 
> very narrow idea of what good sound is all about or some
> other such 
> limiting opinion about the meaning of life or some such
> thing :)
> 
> Cheers
> RicB
> 
> 
>     We've been through this again and again and again
> on this list, and
>     my opinion ( which will be ridiculed by some here, but
> I have no
>     interest in further defending ) is that old wood that
> has been in
>     decent ( reasonably clean, dry ) environments is
> acoustically
>     superior.  ( As in: "Rich" and
> "Warm" sounding.)  But this superior
>     resonance can not be expressed, when the crown has
> imploded.  I'm
>     doing my first full soundboard recrowning according to
> a  new method
>     ( not yet discussed here ) and may report the results.
>           
> 
>     Euphonious Thumpe