The thecolourbox slide-steel making thread (Foxy Fish Slide)

thecolourbox

So I thought I'd have a go at making something ridiculously impractical, technically rubbish and improbably nonsensical as part of the slide instrument build challenge. It'll probably fail, it'll probably not work properly and I'll no doubt cock things up along the way (I've no idea how to do certain parts of it yet either so that's not a great start) but hey ho, in for a penny in for a pound.

I already had a lap steel, a crappy little number I picked up pretty cheaply and what broke quite early on in it's life. I pulled an instrument lead out one day and the jack and pickguard came with it, so I just left it like that. But stuff like the piece of plastic with the frets on was still there, as was the bridge and the nut etc, so I though why not use them. I also spectacularly failed to make a TV table last year, and there were quite a few offcuts of plywood left so I though I'd use an unconventional wood for this project. I'm not an expert on these things but I'm guessing plywood is not known for its guitar tone ability, but who cares. I have a hand saw, I have a jig saw, and I have a sort of mini circular saw so I think I should be able to cut out of this piece of wood into a cool shape to fit on it what I need to. Here is the donor lap steel and the plank of plywood:

http://i.imgur.com/lp5Cq0X.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/1SZfWp8.jpg

I forgot to take photos before I started so you can see a few pencil drawings on the plank already. More about that in the next post.

My overall plan for the design of this was inspired by those padded tea tray things - you have pedal steels, you have a lap steels, why not have a table steel? So effectively, a slide guitar (I'm going for c6 tuning) that is like a tray top with little legs on it so a) it can sit on top of a table or on your lap, and b) I have space beneath to wire up pickups without having to do any routing. I'll probably do some kind of encasing on the electronics but I don't know how yet, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Shape-wise, I'm currently having a Jetsons style Airline guitar made for me by our master of ceremonies for this challenge, the crazy cat known as WezV, so I'm very much in the angular crazy pointy weirdness mood at present. I'm not very good at sawing straight lines so I've bought a clamp in the hope that doing this will help me to do straight lines...

Hopefully there will be a mockup of the general shape soon that I can post here

thecolourbox

So as you can see, I unscrewed the bridge thinking I'd just place it on my plank and draw through thte screwholes in pencil where I needed to drill in for the screws. But had a thought, no that wouldn't work, because I need to be able to place the bridge in relation to the fret board and the nut! So I put a piece of graph paper over the top of the donor lap steel, and stuck my pencil through the paper into the holes so that I could just place the paper on the plank and draw through the holes I made, if that makes sense. I also unscrewed the fret board thing so I could include the first two screw holes for that in the paper too. Then all I'd need to do is place the fretboard with the screw holes over where I'd drawn the holes and it would be at the right angle. I do think I'm a little bit of a genius sometimes. Here's a close up of that bit:

http://i.imgur.com/BWKZE91.jpg

You'll notice that I appear to have drawn on the fretboard and fret lines rather than using the one on the donor lap steel, which may appear odd, and unnecessary, considering how much easier it'd just be to stick that on with screws the same way as it was on the donor. Unfortunately this was rendered impossible, when this happened:

http://i.imgur.com/xwQXBjD.jpg

Due to one screw not wanting to be unscrewed with my electric driver nor my normal ones. This little bugger in fact:

http://i.imgur.com/GGC8dAM.jpg

The little bugger indeed. So, I'll have to find a way to mark the frets etc when I get round to colouring it in. That's a problem for another day

WezV

Can you stick the fretboard back together. Its little more than a rough guide on a lapsteel anyway

thecolourbox

So, stuff I've still gotta sort out

1. The headstock bit for the tuners. It's currently like a classical guitar which I won't be able to reproduce with all the best will in the world. So I think I'm going to nick the tuners off my crappy Yammy Pacfica which is headed for the tip, and just cut out a basic gutar style headstock for those at the top above the nut. Hopefully that'll work nicely

2. Cutting the shape out (mock up to follow). You can see from the lines I've drawn the one jagged edge looks a bit close to where the pickup is gonna be, but generaly I jusy want something a cool odd ridiculous looking shape regardless of whether it makes things even less practical to use.

3. On the side of the Tray Steel that is facing away from you if you imagine it on your lap, I would like to place two strips of velcro, to fix two mini Mooer sized fx pedals to. Sounds silly, but think of some of the bizarre combinations you could come up with to go with a lap steel! The natural choice I guess would be the Volume Swell pedal and a reverb or chorus, but contrarywise who wouldn't love lapsteel through an octave pedal and shim verb?! As the electronics/iring for the pickup/pots/output jack will all run underneath, the output jack will face upwards, it'll just be a case of running a patch lead from the output to the input of the first pedal, I have those jack to jack metal plug things to put between tw pedals, then job woul be a good un. I like this addition as an idea, kind of a 2 module multi fx of your own ever evolving design

4. The legs and encasing. Legs should be easy as I'll just get some like I saw in B&Q, but encasing stuff like the electronics I'm not so sure about. 

5. Painting it. It's gotta be someting bright and quirky, but not quite sure how to do the fret markings at present. I'm sure I'll think of something.

Budget wise, bearing in mind the £100 limit, is a bit tricky as I'll be using stuff I have already where possible.

Plank = about a 6th of the ply I got from B&Q for about £30, so I'll say £5

Non broken remaining parts from crappy donor lap steel = say another £5

Pickup + pots + jack = as yet unknown. I'll aim for £30 all in second hand. It doesnt need to be great considering the wreck I'm gonna make of the rest of it

Tuners from crappy Pacifica that is headed for a grim death = £8

Spray Paint = £10

Pedals for side bit - depends what I go for, whether Mooer Donner or Eno etc, and what budget I'm left over with

Legs = £10 all in I reckon

thecolourbox

WezV said:

Can you stick the fretboard back together. Its little more than a rough guide on a lapsteel anyway

Nah there's a little bit of it missing where I prized it away from the screw of death, so it'd looks a bit naff and we wouldn't want that would we

thecolourbox

And here is my high quality professionally done mock up of the shape:

http://i.imgur.com/xzw3z6s.png

paulnb57

Fun! What it's all about! Watching this!

thecolourbox

paulnb57;952403" said:

Fun! What it's all about! Watching this!

Don't get to glued to it though as with my lack of skills, there's always the chance it could he in the skip within five minutes if the wrong things go badly...

paulnb57

Haha! Me too!

thecolourbox

So I've done a little bit more on this tonight. I got hold of a clamp in order to try and cut straight lines with my jigsaw, by clamping a straight piece of wood parallel to the line I wanted to cut, then leaning on it with the jig. Seems to have worked, not perfect by any stretch but to be honest, I didn't expect this to be and it's better than I'd managed previously. I've given the edges a good sanding, tried to round off the pointy corners and also the angle where the top of the body goes to the edges. I have come to the conclusion it actually looks a bit like a fish, unwittingly. A fish-steel, steel-fish, slide-fish, who knows

Here are some pictures:

http://i.imgur.com/D1nTXVP.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/NpLisvl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wrcovrf.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/96mWJji.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/L6ES7Ap.jpg

I also noticed a couple of knots in the wood at the top by the headstock. Oh No! I thought, that's going to look a bit rubbish. Well, even more rubbish than the rest of it. But wait a minute, what's that....it looks like a fox?!

http://i.imgur.com/TRKMDVa.jpg

So I'm going to see if I can do something with that as a bit of a logo emblem. I can call it the foxy fish steel.

thecolourbox

One problem I have thought of that I might encounter, is that I'm not sure whether the wood on the headstock will be too thick for the tuners to go through it. Which might be a bit of an issue hadn't it.

If anybody says the wood being too thick matches me being too thick....they'd be right.

I'll have a think what I can do about it....

thecolourbox

Would also like to point out, I am aware that my mock up is a completely different shape to the real thing, I forgot to take the mockup out to the garage with me. And no, I'm not hoping to add a Supro amp for less than my £100 budget

Nomad

thecolourbox said:

One problem I have thought of that I might encounter, is that I'm not sure whether the wood on the headstock will be too thick for the tuners to go through it. Which might be a bit of an issue hadn't it.

The machine heads I got for mine want a headstock about 15mm thick.

thecolourbox

I think my ply is 12mm thick, I still haven't got up off my backside to see what the tuners need

Nomad

The trick with the tuners is to not screw the bush bits all the way down, measure, and then size the wood to fit - you'll have no scope for tightening if you make the wood match that because the thread will bottom out just as you reach the wood. At the same time, you want plenty of thread in the bush to go into the machine head. So, screw them in (with the washer), measure the minimum gap, and then add 1mm or so. Best to do it with all of the tuners in case there's one that's a bit duff and doesn't screw in as far as the others - find the one with the biggest gap and use that as the base.

The 6-a-side tuners I already had lying about, and the 3-a-side ones I got for the lap steel, want 15mm, so it might be a standard. (They're all the die-cast enclose types.) If that's the case, you'll need to add a layer of something. (I've got 20mm meranti and 3mm rosewood, so I need to remove stuff.)

paulnb57

An issue I have had while faffing aroind with my piece of driftwood (about 3/4 inches thick) is that it bends under string tension, I bodged my idea together with a 2x1 mahogany "fingerboard neck" glued and screwed on top, it will not tune with only 3 strings...back to the drawing board for me......

thecolourbox

Ah yeah that's a good point, and likely to be one of many potential reasons to confine this project to the skip when the going gets tough! I'm keeping the donor lap steel for now though so if this fails I'll probably just go the more boring route of stripping and refinishing that and making my own pickguard for it.

paulnb57

Interested to know how thick your donor lap is, I've looked at builds round t'internet and several start with a length of 2x4 inch timber....althoigh a guitar neck is about an inch thick it makes me appreciate the job a trussrod does.....

thecolourbox

Sad to say that due to reasons beyond my ability for counter argument, this and all my other plywood is making its final journey to a pile of firewood this week. Looking forward to seeing what other people come up with now instead