One of the world's first Pedal Steels?

[Alan Brookes]

There's nothing protruding that I could get any grip on, Danny. By the way, the mechanism shown is just a blow up of a section of the photo earlier on the page. It's not one of my guitars. I have a complete 8-string changer in my spares box that I could cannibalise for spares but it's the one I plan to use in the hybrid I'm designing, which will use a regular pedal rack.
Before I retired it would have been no problem. I was the CFO of an electrical engineering company with an enormous metalworking factory building high voltage electrical equipment, and I could have asked one of the metal mechanics to just machine me up some new bars, which would have been a simple five minute job using the equipment they had.

[Danny James]

Those cross bars aren't that hard to make if one has a small vertical milling machine. When I was experimenting with the changer for a lapsteel guitar that I built. I made some cross bars almost identical to the ones in a Multi-Kord. My final product was completely different though. It doesn't have crossbars.

Does the 8 string changer you have look like the one in the picture?

All that I have seen, had a changer like was standard on the older 6 string Multi-Kords, with the exception of the one I owned. I have seen pictures like the one here though.

The lady who I bought my 8 string M-K from, said it was one that Jay had been experimenting with.

She is a lady that I had gone to high school with, and she had known all the Harlin's too. Like me she was a member of the Indianapolis Steel Guitar Club.

Did you ever contact John Quarterman in California? He bought all the parts that Picketts Machine shop in Fishers, Indiana had left over, after Harlins quit production. Pickett's did the machining for their M-K's.

John Quarterman is the one who designed and sold the Quarterman Cones for Resonator & Dobro style guitars.
The last time I talked to John, which was several years ago, he owned Jay Harlin's 15 pedal Multi-Kord.

[Jim Priebe]

Getting back to what the original post was about (and it wasn't really about 'who's first', changer designs or whose vintage collection looks prettiest) here is the original copedent of Jack Richard's Kord King pedal guitar.
When looking at this arrangement we need to remember the E9th concept was years away and Jack was a Jazz and Hawaiian style player not Country who also was adept at bar slanting to get combinations and he used diminished chords a lot.




Steve: re the Corona guitar/amp combo - it is very reminiscent of things made in the post WW11 era here in Oz. I have a lap steel that no one can identify too with a case like that. That amp has an old Rola or Jensen or similar speaker by the look of it and my first "Goldentone" 10 watt valve/tube amp looked like that from the rear - it was a real 'dirty' amp. Guitarists would love it these days - Ugh!