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🦋 The Metal Soundboard: a proposal for a series of luthery projects

Over the course of building the tin-can cello, I've searched around a few times for precursors [1, 2]. I've been a bit surprised at how few examples of an instrument with a metal soundboard I've been able to find! Here are some projects I've had in mind recently:

1. The tin-can cello. This is the project most of my blogging has been about recently, a cello with a washtub body, with the base of the tub as soundboard.
2. A 4-stringed viola da gamba sort of instrument with a wok (bronze) as its soundboard and an arched maple back, and steel strings. I'm not really sure yet of what the scale length will be or what gauge of strings I'll be using. I'm thinking the strings will be tuned to E, A, D, G but I don't know in what octave.
3. A banjo-style instrument with a cymbal as its soundboard.
4. A violin made from pounded-out sheet metal (with a wooden neck/scroll/fingerboard). If bronze can be found in sheet form and is strong enough, I'd like to use it. Otherwise steel. [Looks like sheet bronze, brass, and steel can be had from onlinemetals.com]
5. A (high-tin) bronze urn or vase or bowl (singing bowl?) or bucket, fitted with a wooden neck and bridge, and strings.
6. An erhu with a coffee can resonator.
7. A violin (or soprano violin?) with a cookie tin resonator.
8. A contrabass with a bell as its resonating chamber.

posted evening of Tuesday, November 27th, 2018
➳ More posts about Luthery
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➳ More posts about The Tin-can Cello
➳ More posts about viola d'ottone

An erhu with a coffee can resonator seems like it would be pretty straightforward to build, and I see from Google search that it's been done... Tan Sung Wah of Chinese Musical Instruments Blog reports that the instrument "sounds like a normal erhu....with a mute on it."

I'm seeing this as confirmation of my idea that the string angle across the bridge needs to be steeper in order to put more tension on the soundboard. An erhu has a low bridge and a shallow string angle. A little higher bridge might help solve the problem.

posted morning of December third, 2018 by Jeremy Osner

I am reading "The Piano Shop at the Left Bank by Thad Carhart where he mentions a Chickering piano with a metal soundboard. My former husband says his baby grand (my former baby grand!) has a metal soundboard and it is a Chickering. I cannot converse with my former husband (per his wife), so have been trying to find something on line about metal sounding boards. I have found nothing, but that it is not done! Do you know any source which speaks of this?

posted evening of March 16th, 2019 by Rhonda Branson

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