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#16
10-25-2021, 10:45 AM
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This is timely for me because I recently bought a 1916 AB Chase piano that is some of the most gorgeous flamed mahogany I have ever seen. It's a good piano and I wouldn't take it apart, but I did get curious, as it cost $300 and I do some amateur luthiery, if similar pianos could be used for tonewood. As runamuck and Frank Ford say,it seems pianos with fancy wood are mostly veneer (the legs and such in my Chase are solid, but all of the large panels are definitely veneer), not for cost-cutting reasons but for dimensional stability. I have seen a maple tele neck made from an old piano pinblock, so I wonder if soundboards could be a source of wood, but maple and spruce are in better supply than flamed mahoghany/BRW/the fancy woods used for showy pianos. Perhaps too bad the old abandoned pianos of the world aren't a feasible source of tonewood, but probably also nice that they're more useful as the musical instruments they were made to be than as source material.
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#17
11-16-2021, 09:43 PM
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Spent some time with professional piano restorers. Seems most older, (>100 yr old) pianos are frequently unexplored possible tone-woods covered with veneer. Begs question, how did they create such uniform and thin veneers by hand?? Extraordinary woodwork. Techniques lost in the fog of time. This was in the 1800’s….. no automation or robotics! Amazing!
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#18
11-16-2021, 10:02 PM
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Quote:
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#19
11-17-2021, 02:13 AM
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Veneer slicing was automated in the 1800's, initially using steam power. The two most common slicing methods are rotary cut (on a lathe) and flat sliced. The wood is boiled prior to slicing. Rotary cut is the least wasteful, which translates to the cheapest. But it produces jagged growth rings (think plywood) and is usually relegated to uses where appearance is secondary.
Piano cases are generally lumber core construction. The core is a cheaper wood like poplar that is glued up from narrow boards. I have seen many other core woods on pianos, including chestnut, soft maple, sycamore, ash, and gum. For stability, both sides of the core are veneered with two layers: a crossband layer with the grain perpendicular to the length, and an outer layer with the grain parallel to the length. The crossband is often rotary cut poplar or similar wood, and the outer layer the finish wood that is flat sliced for best appearance. While the exposed side is often veneered with premier quality mahogany, quartered oak, walnut, maple, cherry, or rosewood, the inside surface may be lesser quality veneer of the same species, or a cheaper domestic species in the case of mahogany or rosewood pianos. I have seen many mahogany pianos that were veneered on the inside with birdseye maple, presumably because of the reflective quality of hard maple. Last edited by John Arnold; 11-17-2021 at 02:26 AM.
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#20
11-17-2021, 02:34 PM
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I had a friend that worked in a mill that made veneer and used the slice method. A big log would be sawn right down the middle so that you had two long halves. A machine with a clamp, like a big hand that grabs, would grab the cut face of the wood and then it would raise and then lower it over a very very sharp blade starting with the bark side first.
Once it was done slicing all the veneers up to the point where it was getting close to the metal hand that section of 'waste wood' was tossed aside and the other half was done. That section of waste wood is essentially quarter sawn wood about two inches thick. For a while there I had some awesome supplies of cherry and walnut.
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#21
11-17-2021, 06:19 PM
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Those leftover pieces from flat slicing half logs are known as veneer backers. I used to buy them from a nearby veneer mill. That mill mostly cut cherry sourced from Pennsylvania.
I also bought some Brazilian rosewood veneer backers in the 1980's. I still have some of them.
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#22
11-17-2021, 08:16 PM
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#23
11-19-2021, 04:27 PM
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Veneer backers are a mixed bag, particularly when they are dense hardwoods like rosewood. Though they are mostly center cuts (which are nice quartered boards once ripped through the heart), they do tend to have more checking in the heart, due to the process of boiling the logs. Some of the Brazilian rosewood Martin sourced in the1980's was from veneer backers, and some of those guitars ended up with cracks that appeared later.
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