Re: Just a thought

On 9/17/2024 5:45 PM, Mark J cleary wrote:

Since I deal in high end archtop acoustic guitars this thought occurred to me. I repair guitar and bikes and service them while they are different some things are quite interrelated.
 1. Tuning and setting up intonation on the guitar with strings is very similar in many respects to build wheels. A set of gradual iterations. Yes I can build a wheel and use my ear to get even tension. My ear is very close spoke tension tool.
 2. Parts are interchangeable and different setups yield different results. Tuners can wear out like BB. Tailpieces changed to get different response like cassettes.
 3 Adjusting brakes and rotors are much like setting a neck all the stuff needs to be square.
 Now here is the bigger difference. Bikes and technology change and are almost nothing like the bike used in the TDF in the 1930's. However the finest acoustic archtop guitars made in the 1930s are still build the same way and with the same material almost to a match. The finest sounding guitars generally are those from the 1930s but todays guitars sound wonderful. The only thing is you cannot make a new guitar that is 85 years old even if you use wood that is 85 years old sitting around in the shop.
 My words of advice are basically at the core bikes might not be all that different for all but the few roadies in the world. Most are just using them to get from one place to the other.

Some interesting ideas there.
I still play some guitar, mostly fingerpicking/classical style, but I've moved away from it and play much more fiddle these days.
About the sound of the old instruements: Everybody "knows" that new violins don't sound as good as old ones that have been "played in," and of course nothing sounds as glorious as a Stradivarius or Guaneri from around 1700 AD. Everybody knows that's true, and Strads go for millions of dollars.
Except that some blind tests have shown that modern violins can sound just as good or even better, both to the audience and to the player. People can't actually tell by sound which violin is new vs. old.
Similar things have been found for expensive fine old wines vs. modern less expensive wines, with the added weirdness that brain scans found people's brains really do exhibit much more pleasure if the people _think_ they are drinking an expensive old wine, compared to a modern wine. Even if it's really the same wine!
So humans are psychologically complicated and, well, easily influenced. I wouldn't be surprised to find the same phenomenon applies to guitars. And I'm positive it applies to bikes!
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- Frank Krygowski