When an original soundboard needs restoration, we evaluate the board to ensure structural integrity, hand sand it and repair any damage utilizing our special methods. A cracked sounding board will limit the value somewhat. Do i need to be very worried if i find cracks in the sound board of a very old piano. Cracked soundboards piano tuning in edmonton daniels piano. Older instruments, more than 50 years, have some sort of sounding board deterioration. The cracks will expand and only cause you trouble if you cannot have a strictly controlled and sterile environment. Like the speaker of a radio, a pianos sounding board is a vibrating diaphragm. Soundboard cracks cbh carey beebe harpsichords australia. Greg nicolett forbidden to face the natural light mvt 1 conducted by brian kaufman. Piano soundboard restoration is an exacting and timed honed process.
It does demonstrate that the instrument has had some type of stress, most likely heatdryness or colddampness and the crack is the result. So youve noticed the soundboard of your piano has a crack. When the strings are linked, or coupled, to the soundboard by the means of the. A new soundboard is custom tapered and fitted into the specific piano.
Graymarket pianos and cracked soundboards pianobuyer. Solid spruce soundboards swell and shrink with seasonal changes in humidity and, over time, can develop cracks. Hodgson mill cracked wheat cereal, 18ounce pack of 6, hearthealthy hot breakfast cereal for a wholesome start to your morning, enjoy with fresh berries. Soundboard cracks are glued and set as needed, and bridge repairs are made. I cant count the number of times someone has said to me. The sound board is a five eighths inch thick wooden board in the back of the piano. The boards themselves may also crack along the grain of the wood. This drying out process eventually could lead to a split occurring along the grain somewhere on the soundboard. The grain of the rib runs at right angles to the grain of the sounding board. On the back of it, it has one inch ribs which stabilize it by running against the grain of the sound board. Perhaps it looks less like a smooth, machined piece of carpentry and more like a freight pallet.
So that it will vibrate freely, a sounding board is necessarily a very thin panel, usually from 316 to 38 of an inch thick. Thus there persists a common notion that a crack in the wood must in some. If the wood is not dried properly it can lead to warping and cracking. No real music can come out of a conventional piano except through the sounding board. So youve noticed the soundboard of your piano has a crackor perhaps many cracks. In an upright piano, the sound board is a large vertical plate at the back of the instrument. Compared to the 810mm thickness of a modern piano soundboard, that of the. Shimming produces a crack between the shim and the soundboard right at the. Brigham larson, registered piano technician, dispels the myth that a broken soundboard always means a piano is no longer playable. More generally, any hard surface can act as a sound board. Cracks in a piano soundboard are common and often are not sufficient reason to.
In this article, i trace some of the history of laminated soundboard technology, then. The soundboard is what allows the piano to project its sound. Soundboards vary in size depending on how large the piano. A sound board, or soundboard, is the surface of a string instrument that the strings vibrate against, usually via some sort of bridge. One of the problems that comes up most frequently in buying a used piano is judging the significance of a cracked soundboard.
But if it has cracks in the sound board, than it is better to leave it for a museum. Years of vibration and climate changes can cause the soundboard s pieces to split at the seams. A piano s soundboard is one of the most important pieces on a piano. Can a digital keyboard ever hope to match the glories of the acoustic piano. As the string vibrates back and forth, it displaces the air, creating sound waves. High quality woods are used in the best instruments for sound quality and. Whether you have a grand piano or an upright piano, fixing cracks is one of the most common soundboard repairs. Epoxy soundboard crack repair pianotech piano technicians guild. The string alone, however, has a very small surface area, which means that it cannot displace a large amount of air, making it difficult to hear. The sounding board is the most important single part in the piano because if the board is bad, you do not have a piano until there has been a major repair job. The repair may be not much wider than a grain in the wood. Also for upright pianos, check for signs of water damage along the bottom edge.
Across the grain, spruce is actually stronger than the same weight of. The traditional sound board is made of several five eighths thick boards which are glued side by side across the whole inside. If you open up the lid of either your upright or grand piano and look down, you will see a shiny piece of wood that runs the down the back or the bottom of the instrument. In the case of the piano, the string begins to vibrate when it is struck by the hammer. An example is when someone strikes a tuning fork and holds. Evenmore so by playing on it consistantly, you will only make the cracks worse. The nostalgia of owning a piano from liszts time sounds tempting.