Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Bamboo as a Piano Building Material

I have played Bamboo flute (Bansuri) for several years. Judging from those experiences, Bamboo is very susceptible to micro-fissures - I have had more than a few flutes completely ruined because of these. There are probably ways to work with Bamboo given its strengths and limitations - but it is probably not as straightforward as just replacing one wood with another.

Osho

I very much appreciate all of the responses. It is clear that Bamboo is quite the sustainable material and has some amazing properties. It, however is its own kind of material and has to be treated and explored on that basis. The purpose of starting this topic has been to discover what is already known and being done and those responses have been very encouraging.

There are always positives and negatives. A new material always needs research and development as well as adaptation to it. My hope is that Piano Manufacturers will see these blogs and be inspired to engage in the very necessary research and development. So, please keep the comments coming. Google picks up on them.

For the countries and areas of the world where Bamboo Cultivation can solve Flooding and Deforestation problems, I hope that this blog also contributes to the idea that Bamboo Cultivation can go a long way towards solving them both in the short and long term.

I wonder if anyone has tried to cultivate bamboo and select species qualities that could be developed/enhanced into a product more suitable for construction materials???

One of my adept from Russia, Grigory used a laminated dried lake cane to strengthen a pin, which by its characteristics is close to bamboo, I believe. He said that he glued the cut pieces of thick 5-7 layers of reeds used PVA glue and dried them. Then he made 4mm shims. He believes that the friction is larger than the cardboard. I asked him to send a video. He has not done this until now.
saxaul would be best material for manufacture piano because it's wood very hard. Especially for making a pinblock, I'm think so
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haloxylon_ammodendron

Interesting discussion on bamboo as a building material. Need to see prototype. Bamboo is very common in places like scaffolding in Hong Kong and many places in S-E Asia. It is very strong and durable. To use it for piano building you probably need to get the Chinese involved as partners. They still have a passion for acoustic pianos from their 2 concert pianist idols "Lang Lang" & "Yundi Li".

There are already a number of people including myself who are not exactly a fan of electronic keyboards but because of cost and other considerations cannot have an acoustic at home. Being part of a music group I need my instruments to travel around. And living in a high-rise it gets impractical to move a piano up & down an elevator even when the cost of an instrument is not a concern.

Laminated bamboo may be a good material for music instrument. But who care the cost of material and sustainability? Its easier to market a crapy "solid wood" sound board piano. Even plastic parts not generally accepted in piano. Sales and marketing cost most. For a bamboo piano, will push up the marketing cost. Sorry I don't see there is future for bamboo piano.

mcontraveos, Thank you for posting the bamboo links. Very interesting.

Yes. Interesting stuff. Too bad the last entry is 2014...

I believe bamboo is a good sound board material for it has long fibre. But its not easy to be generally accepted. There is bamboo speaker cabinet which has good reputation in enthusiast electronic forum, but it still not common. Still a long way to go.

To cite bamboo guitar making is not off topic because so far, making a piano from bamboo is only a theoretical idea (other than some small parts such as hammer shanks and moldings that are already being made). The question has been if bamboo might make a good soundboard. Since no one has made one yet, we do not really know.

Therefore, if someone makes another kind of acoustic instrument from bamboo and it has any kind of reasonable success, it demonstrates that it is worthy of research and development.

I searched "Bamboo Guitar" on You Tube and found two interesting videos. These are both prototype guitars but they both do demonstrate that bamboo can work.

The first shows a guitar that has a very warm tone but a rather short sustain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no2I0no2PUE

The second shows a much brighter sounding guitar with very good sustain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nACbZOHHFNM

But... is the difference between the two guitars not mainly the difference between nylon and steel strings?

I agree that usage of bamboo in guitars if very much related to the topic. Here is commercial use of bamboo in guitars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-mupQDBOJU


I would be interested in doing a bamboo soundboard if I could afford the research costs.

I figured that there must be some differences between the two guitars but I didn't notice that the second one had steel strings. I didn't look long enough but I had noticed that the first had nylon or gut strings. I do not know enough about guitars to know if that also makes a difference in the sustain. Just the recording techniques can also make a difference in the sound that we hear.

I have read that bamboo has a tensile strength higher than steel. If clothing is being made of bamboo fibers, could not guitar strings also be made from it?

I thought that the combination of using bamboo for the back, sides and neck of the guitar but still using spruce for what we would think of as the soundboard was interesting. It is as if the maker had predetermined that bamboo would not work or maybe had tried it and didn't like the result so a compromise was made.

Ultimately, that could be the case for pianos, at least until spruce becomes so rare and expensive that some other material becomes more practical. In a previous post, I likened the use of bamboo for a soundboard to the use of laminated soundboards in affordable, post WW II pianos. It worked but those pianos always had that laminated board sound.

At this point, we simply do not know. The answer has to come from manufacturers whose pockets are deep enough to do the research and development. They will have to manipulate bamboo in specific ways that it has not been so far. Bamboo flooring material would not work as a piano soundboard, I do not suppose.

What I can see happening is bamboo slowly and incrementally working its way into piano construction. Certainly, vertical piano sides, panels and keybeds. Small grand rims. legs, lyres, lids, keybeds and keyframes. One person on another forum commented about backposts for verticals and beams for grands. He indicated that it takes such bamboo timber a few years to cure but that would be no different really than other wood conditioning processes.

Interesting discussion.

There are, as Bill has pointed out, a number of places where bamboo could be used in piano construction. This is a discussion I've had with several different manufacturers but have received mostly blank stares in response. Part of the reason for those blank stares is that there is less R&D going on in piano factories than we would like to think. Some, to be sure, but much of that is going into manufacturing technologies.

Before bamboo is accepted as a mainstream material, manufacturers are going to have to have a lot more experience with how it reacts in a number of different applications. Bamboo is not a magic bullet. Yes, it does have many attractive mechanical features but, from the manufacturers standpoint, it also has several significant drawbacks. It does not take kindly to screw fasteners. Even with properly sized pilot holes it tends to split readily. And, if it doesn't split today, it might well do so next month or next year. And, when I say split, I mean split! That split can extend the full length of the piece being worked. Piano makers use a fair number of flat head screws. These don't work well in bamboo for the same reason -- the wedging effect of the screw head tends to crack the stuff. To be sure, fastening systems can be developed to overcome this but it is one more difficulty to be overcome before the material come into common use.

Like wood, bamboo changes dimension along with variations in moisture content. With (most) woods, however, the amount of dimensional change is consistent along its length. Not so with bamboo -- the expansion and contraction characteristic varies along its length. This is not a catastrophic flaw, but it is something piano makers will have to learn to work with. Fortunately, like wood, bamboo can be formed into laminates which, just like wood laminates, improves their dimensional stability.

I do believe at least some varieties of bamboo -- like wood, there are many varieties of bamboo -- are suitable for use in pianos. The difficulty is that no one wants to be first. And for good reason. Modern pianos carry long warranties. No one wants to introduce a relatively untested material and take the chance that eight years later something is going to crack. Or split. Or something. A mistake could put the company out of business.

My recommendation so far has been to start with something simple. Something like the core material for a soundboard, for example. This is less risky than it sounds. To be sure, the soundboard is a critical component of the piano. But a thin -- 5.0 mm -- layer of bamboo sandwiched between two layers of spruce veneer would really be quite safe. I'm a little skeptical of using "solid" bamboo for making soundboard panels. I have not been able to track down reliable statistics on the "perpendicular-to-grain" tensile strength of bamboo but, given its propensity to split when a normal screw is driven into the stuff, I'm skeptical. I'd like to set up a long-term test cycling a constrained bamboo panel through atmospheres with a relative humidity varying from, say, 10% to 80%. The results could be either discouraging or encouraging; in either case they would be enlightening.

ddf.

Interesting discussion, Del. I believe bamboo, when used for flooring and other applications, is highly processed. I don't exactly how it's done, but it involves cutting the bamboo into strips and then gluing them together. If the strips are thin enough, and the glue strong enough, this process might eliminate the splitting problem you mention. I happen to have a bamboo cutting board, and FWIW, it sure is hard and durable. As you say, laminating thin panels with some desirable angle between them would further decrease splitting and anisotropy. I could perhaps imagine laminated bamboo making an exceptionally hard and dense grand rim.

I suppose that blank stares is better than rolling eyes. Thank you for the input, Del. What you say about splitting seems to rule out bamboo action rails. However, just as Roy has been, I have been impressed with the cutting board I received as a gift some 10 years ago. It dulls knives which can hardly make a scratch in it. It has been through the dishwasher hundreds of times and has never deformed or delaminated in any way.

This made me think that it could be good pinblock material but when I read what you said about splitting, I wondered again. Still, I wonder about what Roy says, about what happens when bamboo is highly processed and compressed. Something like what happens when coal is turned into a diamond when there is enough heat and pressure applied.

I am just dreaming, of course but what fuels that dream is the foundation: the fiber. What happens to it when it is processed sufficiently? Is the cutting board so rigid and durable mostly because of the heat and pressure or is the adhesive that is mixed in also a factor and does the combination of the two provide for the ultimate properties?

If an ultimately useful material is the result of a combination of materials, then that is what needs to be looked at. What is the adhesive? Is it expensive? Is it toxic? Can the starch that is removed from the raw material actually be part of the adhesive? In other words, take it out, process it and put it back in some way that really binds those fibers together in a way that will not result in the kinds of failures that were described.

Some examples of combination materials are carbon added to iron to make steel. Synthetic fibers combined with natural to create a product which is superior to either. Steel reinforcement of concrete. Adhesives and pressure applied to wood particles that otherwise would be waste materials to make a strong, rigid and durable product.

One of the problems with high density particle board is the very heavy weight of the material. Some of these piano lids, while they remain nice and flat, are so heavy that it takes a fairly strong person to lift them. Yes, there are now hydraulic hinges that help but they add a lot of cost to a modestly priced piano.

What if bamboo were processed in the same way as wood particles? In other words, forget about the linear fiber. Chop it up, glue it together under high pressure and then what would it be like?

I don't think this is a catastrophic issue. Lots of wood species are also prone to cracking and/or splitting. With experience we have learned to live with this. And devise methods that work to overcome the problem. But somebody is going to have to do the hard work of finding efficient (i.e., economical) solutions.


Don’t know. I rather suspect that, as the common wood species we have grown to depend on become more expensive and as their quality goes down, some innovative companies (not in the piano industry) will start to work on this.


Again, I don’t know. You have brought up one of my favorite materials to hate, however: MDF (or medium density fiberboard). It’s called “medium” only because it is moderately less dense than HDF. In making these products, the weight of the fiber is not the issue; it is the weight of the adhesive. While an MDF panel is inherently flat and the material is reasonably stable (as long as liquid water is kept away) it is heavy. So heavy that the lids of even small grands can be difficult for some people to lift. This seems counter-productive to me—why make a product some percentage of your potential market cannot comfortably use?

Grand lids seem to be a logical place to start. Some species of bamboo are quite light. I should think that the material could be processed into laminated panels that should be stable. A suitable hardwood strip could be set in where the screws need to hold. And normal humans might be able to lift the damn things.

I’m not trying to be negative about this, I’m just pointing out some of the issues that are preventing pianomakers from running headlong into accepting it.

I mentioned the possibility of using one of the lighter species of bamboo as a core material for laminated soundboard panel construction. I think it could work. It will take some development but I don’t see any insurmountable problems. Now, can you imagine trying to sell a piano equipped with such a soundboard panel?

At least as much effort will have to be put into marketing as in the actual development of these materials.

ddf

It is no wonder that your services are in demand Mr. Fandrich.
Here is to hoping that marketers and manufacturers will listen to you and others sooner than later.

Thanks for the information, Del. I had wondered is it were not indeed the adhesive itself that made MDF and HDF so heavy. If a grand lid could be made of the same material as that cutting board I have, it would remain as flat as the MDF and HDF types but would be as light as a piece of common plywood.

You mentioned affixing a piece of hardwood to edges that have to accept screws (like where hinges are attached) so there would be no splitting and the tiny screws they always use would not strip out but this whole idea is about using a sustainable source of raw material that grows like weeds. If the bamboo does not support fixtures, then could some synthetic material be used for edges?

The hinges that attach the lid to the spine side of the rim have also been a problem. I have seen them easily rip out of a well known and otherwise good quality Japanese made piano. We have to repair them with CA glue. It seems to me that edges that have to hold screws such as this could also be chemically treated so that they could hold up to screws. This might not work for action rails but certainly for lid hinges and other places where fasteners have to work such as leg and lyre lag bolts.

I honestly don't think the consumer would have that much of a problem knowing that bamboo had been used in large parts of a piano structure. As someone mentioned, the word itself could use a makeover. These days, people adapt to new ideas and innovations much more quickly than they used to. It would be up to marketing people in how it can be presented to make it appealing. "Sustainable" materials makes for a great buzz word these days. If it is sustainable, the Millennials are buying it.

I'm not quite the purist you are, Bill.

I've been dealing with piano manufacturers for some years now. I've been fighting the battle to get them to accept simple laminated "all-spruce" soundboards for years. I've become something of a pragmatist.

We must reduce the demands on Earths resources in every way we can. If I were Emperor of Earth I could solve the problem with the stroke of a pen. Fortunately, I'm not the Emperor of Earth. So, it will take a little longer. And, yes, I understand that we may not have much time left.

I gauge success in small steps. I rejoice in the acceptance of a laminated "all-spruce" soundboard by even a small segment of the industry. I would also rejoice in the acceptance of a lightweight bamboo-core grand piano lid that used a relatively small hardwood strip along the split between the main lid and the front lid if that was required to accommodate the screws used in conventional piano construction.

I would rejoice in the acceptance of a thin bamboo core used in a laminated soundboard construction with spruce faces.

Change and progress rarely come overnight. At least not in the piano industry. It usually comes much more incrementally.

Lest anyone be discouraged by what I say, don't be -- every effort to sway public opinion is helpful. Indeed, essential. In some industries progress is led by innovative companies that compete for new customers through innovation and progress. Not so, in the piano industry. Here, it seems, progress must be forced, kicking and screaming, on the companies from the bottom up. Only when the customers -- i.e, the dealers -- demand progress and innovation that we see it. So, keep on demanding....

ddf

Is progress and change most likely to come from China, because of the buoyant piano industry there, and the sheer volume of production? In traditional piano-making parts of the world, where the industry is in decline and profits tight, I can see that companies would be very risk-averse.