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#1
12-31-2016, 02:56 AM
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Cleats dampening the volume.
I purchased an all solid guitar with known cracks in the top, professionally repaired. It had some miles on it, and I knew what the sound should be, more or less (I do like this maker's guitars). It sounded nice enough, but lacked the builder's characteristic volume. When I felt under the top, there were five cleats within the soundboard's sweet area, and each was thicker (3.42 mm) than the soundboard itself (3.09 mm). Some hours' work, I sanded/filed them to half of their thicknesses, at which point the guitar was freed up. They were cleanly glued in, placed where they should have been, professional in those respects.
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#3
12-31-2016, 12:28 PM
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Quote:
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#4
12-31-2016, 05:43 PM
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Each is a rectangle, one inch long, that's an estimate by touch. How I was able to measure their thickness was that two of the cleats were glued underneath the front of the soundhole, there to stabilize cracks running from the edges of the fretboard.
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#5
12-31-2016, 06:29 PM
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I was looking for but could not find a study done by a luthier on violins and it had some incredible results. He of course like everyone else wanted to know why the Stradivarius sound so good. His conclusion?
Cleats. So many of the old violins have been repaired so many times over the last hundreds of years that they have all kinds of crack repairs and cleats. What he found was that with judicious placing of cleats one can actually control the tone of the sound board. So much so that his client can come into the shop and he will 'tune' the violin to their liking by placing cleats in. I know this has nothing to do with your story directly, and certainly those sound like ridiculously huge cleats, but indirectly it just goes to show that cleats in and of themselves are not necessarily bad, or good. Some builders even build with them for the center seam. The goal of the repair though should be to never alter the original tone and big heavy cleats most certainly will.
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#6
12-31-2016, 11:38 PM
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Placement of cleats for tuning purposes - this may explain a cleat that I found in the sweet area of an Ehlers guitar. It wasn't beneath a crack, but isolated, away from braces.
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#7
01-01-2017, 03:23 PM
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One of my violin making friends talked about cleats once. Lots of old fiddles come in with repaired cracks sporting a line of cleats. Often there will be a new crack along the end of the line of cleats because the cleats are too thick to bend with the wood they're glued to. This causes a stress riser and a new crack. In other cases, the cleats will be peeling up because, again, they're too stiff to bend with the wood. In many years of repairs, though, he'd never seen a broken cleat. It's easy to make them too stiff, and difficult to make them too thin.
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