The Steel Guitar Forum

Yes!
The pickups Bigsby put on a lot of the guitars he made had black oxide cap screws as the pole pieces.

I'm using Fusion 360 for CAD and CAM, it's a pretty powerful program for $500 a year. There was a bit of tear out on the birdseye, I'm trying to figure how to address it, I'm gonna try some spot application of ZPoxy. Unfortunately I don't have access to a thickness sander, which I think it how most ...

Hi Greg, I use a space in Claremont, Nh. The spot is very well equipped, woodshop has good quality table saws, 20 inch bandsaw, helical 8 inch long bed jointer, 20 inch helical planer, shopbot CNC gantry router, machine shop has a surface grinder, 14" geared lathe, 2 mills, one is a bit disasse...

Anyone know who played steel on Wynn Stewart's Wishful Thinking?

Here are my attempts at making Bigsby style PUs https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/userpix2203/21863_pickup_1.jpg Here is a 8 string rail, I cast the cover, the rail is chromoly and the base is hot rolled 0.2 and they are TIG welded together to try and replicate as best I could the cast iron rail+plate...

There is a little mess up on the head of the casting but it's not too severe. I use one of those $140 Gongyi propane furnace kits from Amazon for melting the aluminum, it takes about 10 minutes to melt enough aluminum to do something like the head, its pretty easy. https://www.youtube.com/@olfoundry...

Yeah the birdseye turned out to have quite a lot of figure, the eyes are small but there are a lot of them, it's sort of difficult to determine how it will look when it is rough sawn at the lumber yard. I use a makerspace for doing a lot of the work and they got a new powermatic 20" planer with...

https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/userpix2203/21863_IMG_07691_1.jpg okeydokey some of the routing done, more machining on the cast parts. Was able to fly cut the faces of the head, drill most holes in the parts and milled the pickup blade slot. Cast aluminum aint too nice to machine...very gummy. Wis...

That looks awesome. What sort of wood is used for the fretboard?

Yes, although I think the ones I have a slightly larger than the ones used on the Grady Martin and Hezzy Hall guitars. Bigsby seemed to use different knobs on almost every one of his builds.

Got the laser cut stuff in today, was able to joint and plane the birdseye I picked up, milled flats on the head for the tuners (the pattern has a 2 degree draft on all sides in order to make it easy to remove from the sand mold). You can see a big defect in the casting where I believe some sand col...

Have you tried this before? No! :lol: I've built about 7 complete guitars, never a lap steel. Doing the design for it has been deceptively difficult, I suppose it's just being a bit unfamiliar with steels but getting all the parts (and accompanying holes, cavities, etc to fit has been trickier than...

I think the perceivable impact on sound that tubes provide is almost always vastly overblown. It's mostly in audiophile la-la land. Ruby is not a manufacturer but a distributor, there are only a handful of factories in the world that produce vacuum tubes....many Ruby tubes are just JJ tubes that hav...

Hey, thanks! pickups are CNCed Bridge, tremolo parts are cast I finished this one here are some pics https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/userpix2203/21863_hh_1.jpg https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/userpix2203/21863_hh3_1.jpg Currently working on a Bigsby-fied old Kay Swingmaster and building a Bigsby ins...

Hi New member I'm currently building a 28.5 scale baritone 8 string with benders. Thought I might as well make a build thread. I've been casting hardware for guitars for a bit, I did this head last week which is the largest item I've cast so far. Cast the Bigsby style cover and bridge chassis, which...

That's awesome

Thanks for the advice. Ill probably go with just 2 palm levers, maybe go with E7 tuning transposed down 5 steps? Digging around it seems like people have issues using palm levers/multibenders with C6? I came up with this tuning...no clue how far off the mark I am. Eb F# G# B Eb F# B G# The Eb in the...

I'm in the process of building a baritone 8 string console. I know very little about lap, console and pedal steel, I know zip about music theory...this is just sort of a project to build a thing I can noodle around on. The scale length is going to be 28.5, I would like to make some benders for it th...

A bronze tone bar seems like a great idea, but don't see them. Is there a problem or maybe the material is just too expensive? I'd like to try making one but not if there is no benefit. I used to experiment with tunings and the wound strings would hang up on the aluminum nut. Thinking bronze's self...

Raw stock of bronze for flat bar seems incredibly expensive, but round bar stock seems a lot more affordable but still pretty expensive, I'm seeing about $40 per 1 inch x 12 inch round bar, which would for 3 tone bars...you'd have to charge a lot of money per bar to make it worth it I suppose? I'm j...

Have you tried different outlets in your house?

The backing plate is low carbon steel, 0.072" thick. I could go up to about 0.100" thick steel.

I had contacted an owner of some of his steels and he had his pickups rewound, those were the specs I got from him. I'm just going through his writings and he says that the pickups for the steels had around 2k and the guitar had a bit shy of 4k. I redesigned the bobbin so I can fit the magnets on th...

Thank you so much for those photos, it clears up a lot! Do you know if the hex screw pole piece pickups Bigsby made had the same magnet arrangement? I'm having a hard time envisioning 5000-5500 winds on 38 AWG wire fitting in a bobbin spool that skinny, this bobbin has 5500 and it is pretty much fil...

Lennox bi-metal blade on my upright 14" Grizzly for cutting features, I have a 7x12 horizontal too for everything else.
Helps to chalk or wax the blade when cutting aluminum since it can easily chip weld to teeth and cause problems.