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:
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
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Nomad
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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.)
Nomad
Nobody loves me but my mother... and she could be jivin' too...
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