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Comments
A tele bridge is a good choice... easy to adjust for zero radius.
i prefer a longer scale length. 24” works great.
minimum thickness would be about 1 1/2” . I prefer about 2” for the central core, normally with thinner wings.
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Also, there is lots of mahogany on ebay, what is the best value, and is it worth paying more for a piece that says its Brazilian, for example? Or is there another wood that you might recommend?
Expect very high tension (15 gauge set), so use lots of wood, like @WezV says
Because it's a very high nut, it will put a lot of tension in a strange way, I am not sure if anyone else uses bone. Why not use metal?
Personally, I find you need quite a crisp pickup, so if using a HB, use a low output one
I'd like to hear a 30 inch one, but 21 or 24 inch is most common
Don't make the mistake of using standard string spacing
You don’t need high quality wood or perfect grain. A bit of sapelli, utile or meranti should do the trick if you want a mahogany type wood
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Mine was made with the string spacing parallel, and set to pass over the centres of the pole pieces on a Tele bridge pickup set perpendicular to the strings. Bridge and nut were made from brass angle and set to give plenty of string height above the board (about 10mm).
The body was made from a bit of Meranti plank from a local timber place, probably 145mm wide and 45mm thick. It was a fairly low density piece compared to other bits of Meranti I've had from there.
Nomad
Nobody loves me but my mother... and she could be jivin' too...
https://steelguitarforum.com/Forum2/HTML/007724.html
https://i.imgur.com/JVTQgEj.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Zv4FTU8.jpg
“Theory is something that is written down after the music has been made so we can explain it to others”– Levi Clay
https://www.mojopickups.co.uk/product/mojo-lapsteel/
£100 UK mailed...
Everyone settled on 13-56 string guages?
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Here's my bridge and nut...
Made from 1" brass angle, 1/8" thick. The bridge has slots at the end to retain the string ball-ends. String slots were added to the top edges. The little hole beyond the row of two countersunk holes in the bridge is for the earth wire - it's tapped so that a screw can be put in from underneath to trap the wire.
Nut fitted...
And the bridge...
Lots of screws in the bridge to ensure that it doesn't get pulled out.
Completed instrument...
The pickup is positioned away from the bridge to get a mellower sound.
Nomad
Nobody loves me but my mother... and she could be jivin' too...
seriously, using a tonebar you have to press pretty hard, and 13s will deflect down towards the fretless board.
For the best lapsteel tone, you want no rattles, and that needs very tight strings, way tighter than normal
Also depends what scale you want to play with. C6 tuning is fun, and is not possible with a normal set of strings.
I'd guess you want open G or A (or the same tuning transposed up or down a tone to suit your scale length)
I've seen some lapsteel designs run into trouble using standard pickups and mounts because of the extremely high action required - it can be hard to get the pickups as near to the strings as normal