Wood for homemade lap steel.

[Eric Sprado]

I suspect there is already a discussion about woods. If so please steer me in right direction.
I have a neighbor who has a quite large home sawmill. I have a little blacksmith shop here and am always welding up something for him so he will be glad to help me with some nice wood. I have some blocks of cherry wood from a blow down tree here on my property. Would that be structurally and sonically acceptable for the base of a lap steel? Have access to maple,fir, some oak..Any input appreciated..
Also trying to find access to GOOD parts..

[Bill Groner]

Maple is my fav. curly, tiger, quilted, but can't afford that stuff.

[David Knutson]

Your cherry wood might be interesting as long as it is well dried and stable, but I have a real bias toward maple for the steels I have built. You can get lots of parts from George Boards, and I'm sure others here will chime in on pickups. I have used Lollar pickups, but there are lots of good brands out there.

http://georgeboards.com https://www.lollarguitars.com/

[George Piburn]

Hello from George Boards

Just saw this thread and thought I would chime in a little .

Let's hear more about this chunk of cherry. Thickness , length, width , humidity content?

We find the Cherry very suitable for lap steels, more so than maple, it works easier on the power tool in my opinion.

Sonically , very similar to maple or other closed cell hardwoods.

How dry is it , is the big question at this point.

So far as parts I have new brass nut and bridge sets in 6 and 8 string, plus a lot of other cool goodies if you need them.

For this discussion how about more on your plan - shape - tunings and so on.

[Bill Hatcher]

maple is great...but....you already have some cherry. so go with that.

if its down...how long has been? go out and cut some up into say 3 ft lengths and 2 or 3" thick and say 6" wide and up. take a couple of pieces in the house and put them up in your attic if you have one. thats a good place to heat up wood for a couple months and let it dry out. this is a solid lap steel, not an acoustic or a fretted guitar. you dont really have to be so concerned about exact moisture content as long as the wood is not freshly cut and green. if the cherry has been cut for a while and outside, it might be fine.
after a couple months in the hot attic, mill it and start building! i used to keep a LOT of maple up in the attic for builds. i use maple i bought 35 years ago.

[Eric Sprado]

George Boards:Thanks for the great reply. I WILL go to your site. The tree blew down five years ago. Cut into about twelve foot lengths . My neighbor milled it the next year and stickered it.Biggest cant is about 3 1/2" x 9" x 10'. I'll contact you through your site and you can let me know more about what the heck I'm looking. So glad you have that hardware. Eric. Feel free to email me.

[George Piburn]

You do have good planks to work with for sure.

Chances are super good the moisture content is low - 8% is a good place to try to get to. Moisture meters are common and easy to use, again worth knowing what you are working with. The reason for all of this concern over the moisture level is primarily for the power tools, they do not like wet wood.

Next thing is to look at the end grains for what is called Quarter Sawn. This is when the grains are as vertical as possible.

This test is for what is called Cupping, or a warp in the plank on the 9" wide part.

Long vertical grains will help off set Deflection, or it is called Bow and add strength to the whole tuning - string tension aspect.

Who would have thought so much goes into selecting a plank for a steel guitar? It is worth selecting a best plank before you get into all of the planning and cutting.

[Bill Hatcher]

good words from george.

you have a good a stash as you could ever ask for. may i suggest that you go to a big box store and buy you a piece of pine lumber and make a mock up of the instrument you are going to make. by the time you finish it you will be ready to use your nice wood you have. you dont have to go to the extra work of fine sanding etc. just cut out the basic body and then mount your hardware and the outside string machine heads so you can put on at least the two outside strings. you will be surprised what you will learn when you do this. you have wood that deserves the best you can give it. good luck!

[Bill Groner]

good words from george.

you have a good a stash as you could ever ask for. may i suggest that you go to a big box store and buy you a piece of pine lumber and make a mock up of the instrument you are going to make. by the time you finish it you will be ready to use your nice wood you have. you dont have to go to the extra work of fine sanding etc. just cut out the basic body and then mount your hardware and the outside string machine heads so you can put on at least the two outside strings. you will be surprised what you will learn when you do this. you have wood that deserves the best you can give it. good luck!

Now these are WORDS OF WISDOM for a new builder!

[Andy Volk]

Many early Fenders were made of swamp ash, a very resonant tone wood for solid body steels.

https://www.lmii.com/400-swamp-ash-electric-body-blanks

Walnut dual pros sound pretty good as well. Tom Morrell had a steel built from Mesquite.

Some helpful info on woods:

https://acousticguitar.com/a-tonewood-p ... mal-sound/


https://www.guitarplayer.com/gear/tonew ... -tonewoods

[David Matzenik]

It seems logical that if the wood is going to have any effect on the tone, the string vibration will have to transfer to the body through the bridge and nut. Otherwise, the tone would simply be the sum of string plus pickup.

Therefore the bridge and nut need to have mass and make contact with the wood integrally as possible. Designs at these points are often overlooked for the convenience of Phillips-head screws.

[Eric Sprado]

Philips head screws ,on their best day, are instruments of the Devil..

[Jim Pitman]

Wow, I'm liking the anti phillips head screw tangent.
I will point out, there's an American and metric standard for phillips head screws. Use the right tool.

[Don Kona Woods]

I bought a custom made Koa Wood Lap Steel 35 years ago with an excellent tone. It had strings through the body. I sold it 6 months ago to a man who raved about the quality of tone.

Koa wood is a dense hardwood that produces solid tone, particularly at the high end, with pronounced midrange-y quality.

GeorgeBoards made some instruments of koa wood which was said to have the cleanest tone and the most incredible sustain available today.

[Andy Volk]

Here's a useful work surface built for $100 that might be helpful to people who are building lap steels at home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcq1LQq08lk

[George Piburn]

Hello from George Boards

I wouldn't be so quick to insult Phillips Head Screws, even the chrome ones I use to hold down my massive nut and bridge pieces.

I have hundreds of satisfied clients in every US State and over 20 countries world wide that enjoy the Phillips Head Screws daily..






About Andy's suggested work bench. Nice piece for some one I suppose.

Below are photos of the work table we use to cut out steel guitars.

Only 30 thousand dollars, includes the 3+ Horse power mill
CNC controlled mill positioning
Vacuum hold down table,
Top flattened to .002 tolerance of flat
and the exhaust dust collector.

the 220 power and concrete floor are your expense.

[Nic Neufeld]

Walnut dual pros sound pretty good as well.

Quick question from my ignorance...were the early Fenders actually made from walnut? I have a 57 SM T8 that is, well, walnut finished...but I'm assuming underneath it's alder or ash like almost all the Fenders of the time.

I do have a bass I built with a walnut body...wenge neck, rosewood body cap and fretboard, two large musicman pickups, solid hardware...it is a shoulder punisher, for sure!!

[Bill Groner]

Hello from George Boards

I wouldn't be so quick to insult Phillips Head Screws, even the chrome ones I use to hold down my massive nut and bridge pieces.



I'm with you on the Phillips Head Screws Georgio I also use them on my bridge, but I'm a little more sneaky.......I make my bridges so all one needs to do is put the 2 screws at the distance from their nut for the scale length they are using. What you are looking at in the picture is a 2 piece bridge. The stringer plate is one piece, the rod is the 2nd piece. The two are doweled together with the screw holes and the dowel holes on the same center line. The dowels also go into the body. This makes a bullet proof setup, provided the guy doing the drilling and screwing got his part right. So yes, while I do use the phillips head wood screws, they are counter sunk in the plate under the rod and you will never see them.

[Eric Sprado]

Mt main gripe is with the heads.. As a piss poor woodworker who,despite my dad teaching me to pre drill,
I booger up the heads about two turns from the end..So I guess it is my technique that needs devilish inspection...Damn-looking the mirror is hard sometimes...

[Andy Volk]

Nic, check out Jody Carver's response from 2003. Jody was there!

https://steelguitarforum.com/Forum5/HTML/005356.html

[Brian Evans]

Nice stuff. My comment on the OP's cherry is cut it quite close to the size of blank that you will need, say 1/4" on each surface, and let it sit for a couple of weeks. I often mill from rough cut, and find that wood wants to move, release tension, when even quite dry wood is cut. Mill it, let it rest, and then start to joint it, plane it, maybe even in two stages.

I would love to know how that pickup is sounding on Bill Groner's guitar, I love the concept and I'm planning on one when I finally make my lap steel this summer. The name escapes me right now. Edit: Lace Alumatone.

Phillips screws are designed to "cam out" when too much torque is applied, it's a "benefit". There are other similar cross head designs (Pozidrive) that can be better. Being Canadian, we see a lot of Robertson square head screws, which work fantastic and look lousy. Phillips at least look great!

[Bill Groner]

Kevin Glandon is a member on the forum and told me about the Aluma Lace P-90 Riffian Pup. I have them in 4 lap steels I made. If you want to hear what one sounds like, here is the video Kevin made. It is the same Pup that I have in the one pictured. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7ur7MK8r4A

[George Piburn]

For Bill,

My Guitars evolved as with all of us doing this.

I started with same eyedeer , hidden screws under the nut , - lathe-ed roller pins for the metal contact and precision VGroove-ing.

My super originals were all brass plates and pins.

We went to the wood trays for 2 reasons, 1. it was a wood CNC mill shop, 2 it was a more mellow sound.

If you look close we used 2 -- 1/8" diameter metal dowel pins to place the parts in very exacting position drilled by the CNC
Both nut and bridge hide the pins under the pin, and add some energy transfer into the body too.

This is what I prefer on my personal super wally pictured.

When we relocated to Oklahoma in 2006, people were asking for more metallic energy sounding non pedal consoles.
So I went with 3/4 X 1/2 360 brass CNC milled into the shape you see above.
Really expensive to make , but - wow - these are the best we could make.

Hopefully these will give DIY Builders some inspiration to make more cool things.

[Bill Groner]

A couple of questions George. In the first picture, what is the small, metal flap sticking out of the hole where the bridge rod sits? Ground for strings? 3rd picture, what is that powdery looking stuff on the guitar?

[George Piburn]

To Bill

The little tape is a piece of copper to ground the strings, (Beryllium)
The fuzz is my too lazy to keep it dusted off.

To Eric, my 1st learning curve was to WAX the threads of the screw , use a sacrificial screw to create pilot threaded hole that is waxed for lube. Also to hand tighten to prevent buggering the head.

More Importantly, I would love to get back to Eric's design concept, we have yet to read about.

Are you planning a console ? Lap ? 6 - 8 - more strings ?