back again! haven't progressed at all on the build though... I just got back from Canada (beautiful jasper/banff national parks) this morning at midnight. I also have a bunch of other stuff going on, including the SAT subject test in Japanse in 3 months (a standardized test for all you who aren't familiar), the SAT reasoning test (covering reading/math, 4 hours) in 2 months, and the ACT (another standardized test) in a month. oh an another one somewhere. I'm swamped preparing for those, that's what I spent a lot of today doing.
excuses excuses... about the big string tree: those are often seen on floyd rose guitars, and guitarfetish has them pretty cheap. I will buy it if need be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RomanS
About the necessity of a string tree, and the string break angle:
This also depends on how high the nut is on your lap steel - I wouldn't make it higher than about 10mm (3/8") - otherwise you might have problems with parallax when playing.
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Roman, you keep mentionin the 1cm measurement. Can I assume that this 1 cm over the fretboard? the wood for the fretboard is 3/16" (appx. 5mm).
therefore, the actual height of the nut could be 9/16" (15mm) or thereabouts, correct?
the aluminum angle I purchased for the nut is an L-shape. the 2 edges are 3/4" and 1/2" wide (1.9cm and 1.27cm, respectively). since the 1.5cm mark falls right between the two, I would probably shave the 1.9cm down to 1.5 (might need to use my dremel for this one). I would like to get maximum string break over the nut without compromising playability.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sandman72202
I've developed an itch to start one of these too.
My next door neighbor has a stockpile of exotic wood scraps...some of them long enough that are dry enough to use for soomething like this.
where can you get a template for length and scale and so forth ?
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They're great builds. Fun, and you can mess up then get away with it. my scale length is 22.5". This seems like a very common scale length, the majority of the Musician's Friend lap steels (not to mention the "bluestem" ones shared here by Roman) are 22.5". I fed this number into the
crazy awesome fret placement generator. Since they give the result in decimal notation, I realized that it would be a lot easier if I fed the number in after converting it to mm (571.5). This makes it easier to lay out the frets, as it is not fun converting decimals into fractions (as inches generally are displayed in increments of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, etc).
The body shape is a general, simple shape I came up with after a google image search. I think I might have almost directly copied the body shape of a Carvin I found, however it will look much different from any other as the tuners are in-line and on an awesome tele-style headstock.
I forsee progress being very slow from now. Cross-country practice starts tomorrow, and I may be helping out at a lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (if the professor decides to reply to my emails!). List of things to do:
-carve out the rest of the body, rout holes using forestner bit. drill holes, etc.
-round the edges (by hand, of course)
-try full finish on scrap mahogany
-inlay veneer into fretboard, cut out to final shape, glue.
-finish.
-tuners, electronics, nut, bridge, ferrule installation, setup, etc.
"The last 20% always takes 80% of the time". I hope I will finish this by the day after labor day (when school starts) so I can show it off, brag, etc.