The Steel Guitar Forum

I picked up these three parts from E-Bay
To make a 6 string Lap steel guitar

Tailpeice, bridge and nut

You can see the nut is smaller than the bridge like a guitar nut

Can I build a lap steel with tappered strings

You could, but you would be unsatisfied with the result. Better to buy or build a nut that matches the other two parts.

That is what I was thinking

A nut is easy to make

Thanks

If you don't want any taper you can get another bridge.

Fred

Jim,
I was looking at those, too.
I was wondering what the string spread might be on the bridge and nut. The nut looks narrower than the 3/8 spacing I like, and the saddle looks like it might be wider than that. Hard to tell from the picture.

The string spacing on those nuts is way too narrow. Here is a listing where they show the spacing at the nut at 35.71 mm and the bridge at 52.88 mm
The bridge is a little wider than 3/8" spacing and would be fine for Fender spaced single coils and F spaced humbuckers, but that 35.71 mm nut translates to about a 9/32" spacing.
The other thing to consider about those is that the height is listed at a bit over 10mm / just a hair over 3/8 tall. Depending on the thickness of your fretboard, it could be a deal breaker unless you shim the bridge.

A nice thing about having the bridge and nut spacing match is that a bar slant is presumably easier as the string spacing doesn't change as a function of what fret your bar is at. Be aware you must change the bar slant angle regardless of course to line up with the frets and the frets change spacing. However, the string spacing change is just one less variable not making a contribution to your error, and I find lap steels with same spacing throughout easier to do a bar slant accurately.