The Steel Guitar Forum

Saw this on eBay -- Horseshoe magnet looks new and don't recognize body. Anyone know who made this Lapsteel?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lap-Steel-Frypa ... 35caa87d90

That's pretty clearly not a horseshoe pickup - just a regular guitar pickup of some sort, but the metal cover makes it impossible to guess. The body appears to be made of some sort of wood and painted silver to me, although I could be wrong. The frets are just notched out of the fretboard, neither inlaid nor filled.

My guess is a home made attempt to make a Rickenbacker A22.

Brad Bechtel wrote:That's pretty clearly not a horseshoe pickup - just a regular guitar pickup of some sort, but the metal cover makes it impossible to guess.

All due respect Brad, that sure looks like a red horseshoe magnet mounted to split metal for coils to me. I had considered building a pickup similar to this after looking at an old Tutmarc pickup.

If it hadn't been red I may have overlooked that magnet completely, and while some old steels used similar magnets they were (from what I've seen) larger than what's in that thing and far removed from what we normally call horseshoe magnets.

yeah, it looks like a modern interpretation of an earlier style of electronics.

It may be a horseshoe magnet attached to a piece of metal, but it's not a "horseshoe" pickup such as found on the Rickenbacker A22 lap steel. Compare this photo from Rickenbacker's website to the photos in the auction.

Brad Bechtel wrote:It may be a horseshoe magnet attached to a piece of metal, but it's not a "horseshoe" pickup

Yeah, that's kinda why I said "horseshoe magnet looks new" and not Horseshoe Pickup looks new.

If you look at Paul Tutmarc Audovoxes and his sons Seranaders you'll understand what I was talking about.

But as to my original question: metal frypan any ideas who made it...

That's a tiny little magnet ...

The old National and Supro cast steels had a similar pickup ... With a very large - very strong cobalt steel horseshoe ... I've remagged quite a few ...

For them to operate ... The orientation can't be the "standard" classroom horseshoe ...

The flanges must have "like" poles and the curve "U" must be the opposite pole ...

I had to build a jig to hold those magnets in my electromagnet.

Some came in ... Like a high school horseshoe (North on one flange - South on the other) ... All the lines of flux stay within the magnetic circuit ... Very, very poor output and thin tone.

They seemed to have been previously remagnetized ... By folks who didn't understand magnetic circuit theory ...

Once I reoriented them ... There was a big improvement ... But still not in the realm of a real horseshoe pickup ...