The Steel Guitar Forum

How do I adjust the lever throw? I would like it to engage sooner so less movement is required.

You need to be more specific.

What brand of steel?
Which lever? What strings does that lever move?

Then we should be able to help you.

FYI. You can't always do what you are asking because of travel needed to pull a particular string.

...and reducing the travel will generally make it stiffer

LKR lowers 4/8

Obviously, you can adjust the angle that the lever hangs, so that your knee contacts it sooner (it's the screw closest to the floor when the guitar is upright, in playing position).

But I think you're saying that your knee hits the lever, you push it over quite a bit, and towards the middle or end of its travel, it finally starts changing the pitch. And you want it to engage sooner than it currently is.

FYI, the lever travel-distance is always the same in these discussions... but we can adjust the point within that travel where it engages and starts changing the pitch. When you start moving the lever, there's a small amount of travel where there is no pitch change, which I call 'slack.' Then the lever 'engages' and the pitch starts changing all the way to the end of the lever's travel. This part of the lever's travel is called 'throw.' So... that fixed amount of lever-travel is divided into slack plus throw. If you want one of those two things to be shorter, the other must be longer.

How much slack you have is dictated by how long the throw is. If you want less slack before the lever engages, you must have a longer throw.

What you're describing is the symptom of a string that's set up for a short throw. Meaning it must have a lot of slack; it doesn't engage until you've moved the lever quite a bit. It kicks in at the last minute and gets to the target note within a short amount of lever-travel (hence, a "short throw").

Meanwhile, if you want it to engage quicker, you'll want to change the leverage so that the actual pitch-changing part of the travel is set it to be a "longer throw."

To set up a longer throw, you need to move the rod on the bellcrank to a slot that's closer to the axle. You'll probably end up doing this on both strings 4 and 8's pull rods.

My desire is to not have to travel as far with the lever to the stop point.
It seems to me there is little slack and it begins detuning from start position.

I'd like to limit the travel to stop half way and get the D#

I guess I should mention I swapped RKL for LKR recently. I did not use the same hole position for 4/8. Could that also be an issue?

For starters, when you did the swap, whatever the bellcrank settings were when they were on the original RKL... that's what they should be set to now that they're on LKR. In a swap, the leverage settings move over to stick with their note-change function. Maybe move the rods to get the guitar back to original settings first and it might help.

I don't know what changes used to be on this LKR lever, but given the swap to a whole new function, yes, you may not need as much overall travel on that lever as was needed before.

If that's the case, there is a travel-stop screw that you can turn to shorten the travel. If you have the guitar upside down in the case, work the knee lever and watch the mechanism. You should be able to see the screw that it hits at the end of the travel. It will be trial and error to figure out how much to adjust the travel. Maybe try to roughly mimic the length of lever movement on RKL, since that was the pre-swap lever that was handling your E-lowers.

After shortening the travel, be sure fully disengage the the tuning nuts on that lever. After making any kind of leverage or travel adjustment, you always want to start the lever tuning process with no pressure on those nuts, or else you might end up in an 'overtuned' situation.

That seems to have worked. Thanks for your help!

Good deal.